[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

if ie on a mac is your only culprit, then i’d say let it go – you’d be dealing with probably less than 10% of 8% of your visitors – that’s not enough to stress over that bit of placement woe, imho…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

looks like your changePic is still the old one – you are trying to change the src of myPicture, but you should use the document.getElementById one:

document.getElementById(“myPicture”).style.backgroundImage = ‘url(‘ + myPix[randomNum] + ‘)’;

that should do it…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

ya – it’s due to the position:relative thing – it still exists in the page, but then you force it down lower – but at render time, it’s still up there, hence the white spot… :-/

i’d move your picture into the background property of the table cell to get around this:

https://sitruc.com/cow/recalltohonor.html

note that i made a local version of the random image generator there to get the url references right from my server…but this works in firefox, safari and ie…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

well – it’s really hard to estimate without knowing what all you would want your site to do or how big it would be – also if you have a identity already or would need one, etc…

but assuming the following:

1. home page with a custom look and feel
2. inside page template with ties to #1 but slightly more content based
3. 5 pages with content provided by you
4. your own domain on a remote server

then a good web designer shouldn’t charge more than $500 or so for that. but again – _Totally_ depends on how much back and forth you have with them, how many revisions there are, how complex you want things, etc…and #4 would then run you about $20 for the domain per year and then $10-$20/month hosting feees…

if you have more detail i could give you a better idea of what types of costs you’d have…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

ooh – this one might be easier to debug with an example – perchance do you have one?

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

quick guess would be to try adding a margin:0px style attribute to your html body – that would likely get rid of a lot, but it also wouldn’t work if what is down there is html – might just take a good code examination to find the culprit…looks like you’re on that now though as that bottom bar is a very strange color, so maybe you’re setting to test?

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

that’s pretty much my job, really, so i feel qualified for once at least! 🙂

i taught myself everything, but i was lucky in that i was able to grow with the web – i started doing sites back in ’97 or so when you couldn’t even center things on a page, so it helped me to pick up techniques as the web evolved. but it does take some sort of underlying sense, i think, that can’t be taught or learned. you really do have to think differently than traditional design, but i think with a print background, it is in there, as you are used to designing things to catch people’s eyes in certain ways…

that said, there is the very techincal side of ui design, which is hci (human computer interactions). this is a very in-depth study of how best to create interfaces (both hardware and software) for users with regards to (guess what) computers. this is a field that you can get a degree in:

https://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/degrees.asp

but there is also just basic usability. this is easier to teach yourself, but being good at it certainly takes practice – here’s a good site for references and a quick link to their page of suggested books:

https://www.hcibib.org/readings.html

i think a good base place to start is to understand that a lot of good established usability principles are established and good for a reason – they work and are really the best way to go about things. things like scrollbars – there’s a reason that they are where they are on a page, and when flash developers, etc. take liberties and put them in odd places, it might look cool, but ultimately it’s hindering your users, and that’s not good. it’s not to say that design isn’t always evolving and changing, but going with accepted trends and then expanding on those creatively is typically the best route.

maybe also try to specialize – find an area of usability that works for you. for example, i tend to specialize in user interfaces for manging and displaying data. forms, graphs, sites that provide users ways to interact with large amounts of data. some routes take different understandings than others – in my case, doing this type of interface requires me to stay on top of changing web functionality – especially in the areas of javascript and dhtml. things like ajax and the sorts are very useful in making great interfaces, so knowing how to use them is important. so i’ve ended up doing a lot more programming of my own interfaces in a variety of languages. but that’s just my route. some of the best hci people can design perfect interfaces and they don’t know a line of code…but they know what their options are technically so they can make full use of them…

so anyhoo – that’s a quick ramble. in terms of single classes – you are right…i’ve not seen a lot of those around either, which is too bad. if you’re going to teach yourself, the best thing to do is just take every opportunity you can to practice and learn – look at a wide variety of sites (news sites to data sites to visual sites) to see what each site makes use of and why – then try making your own whenever you can get a chance and you’ll pick it up soon enough…and reading if it works… 🙂

hope that helps! feel free to ask any other questions that you might have…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

the high level is that it’s basically just setting a content type for your email to text/html and then putting in basic html as you would on a web page…

there are a ton of 3rd party scripts to do this – don’t know your language of preference, but google up “email newsletter” and the script name of your choice and you should find a ton of options – for example, a good php one that i’ve used is subscribeme lite…

hope that helps! also search the archives here – this one comes up a lot…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

wow – that’s a tough one to find a 3rd party solution for that’s ready to go out of the box… :-/

you could try either oscommerce or x-cart:

https://oscommerce.com
https://www.x-cart.com/

both are open source php solutions so perhaps somebody has written a contribution that does tickets? might take more work on top of that, but it might get you a start…

you could probably do the base concept in these though without a ton of config work – basically a “product” would be a bus ride scheduled for a certain time, and you’d have X number of items of this product in stock, with X being the number of seats on the bus. obviously picking a seat would be much tougher and take more work, but if it was just getting a ticket that might work…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

loaded ok here in ie/xp – 5mb is a bit big to just show a “please wait” without providing a status bar with a load completion percentage, but it did load and work for me…

sitruc