Curtis Thompson
Forum Replies Created
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hello…
you obviously have very good design skills – that was some very good work! the trick with designing stuff like what you see in the nyt piece you originally linked to is also a good understanding of how to present information in an informative way that is also very visually exciting.
you might want to look around at other data visualizations – here’s a starting list, for example:
https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/
a lot of those are very overwhelming to start with, but if they are done in javascript (as a lot are these days if they are in a browser), you can view the source of any page and really see how they are doing it, which is very helpful for learning. then start to come up with your own things that you might want to visualize and start trying to build them yourself – best way to learn, imho.
sitruc
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hello…
in that specific case, they are using a javascript library called jquery (which is just a library of bundled functions so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel) and it is manipulating an svg file.
in general to do web animations, you would likely use jquery or a similar library (mootools, etc.), or possibly flash, which is also a common tool.
then it’s just the html wrapper around it and some css. not to say that this nyt visualization is simple – that one is quite impressive. but at the core, that is what is driving it…
does that answer your question well enough?
sitruc
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hello…
your best bet is to search our archives – this is a very frequent topic over the years, and your situation here sounds like one we’ve addressed in the past.
if you can’t find an answer, though, please respond and bump it back up and we can take a look!
sitruc
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hello…
ya – if somebody is giving away hosting they are making their money somehow – and your domain could be flagged because of it. don’t point your domain at any of these free sites; rather just use them for development and keep the domain separate. you don’t want your domain to be flagged anywhere as bad, because that is just about impossible to undo…
keep us posted – site looks nice!
sitruc
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hello…
a few responses/thoughts:
1. you get what you pay for wrt free hosting. you can get reliable hosting with a ton of great features for under $5/month – i know money is money, but you will be much better off in the long run. that’s just my $.02 though.
2. took a copy of your page local and messed with it. first thing – avoid image and css file names with spaces in them – it just makes creates potential issues. always best to use underscores instead of spaces in web file names.
3. wrt the margins – only very very rarely should you need to use negative margins. if you are using them, you are likely compensating for something, as you were here. better to find the culprit. in this case, your #topnav ul had a margin of “20px 0”, which means it had a margin of 20px on the top and bottom. if you just make that margin “0”, then you are set and that space disappears. as for the other gap beneath, just set your #banner css to have a width of “100%” (not needed for the fix, but while there it’s good) and then a height of the image that is in it, which is “300px” – then that other gap should go away.
sitruc
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hello…
the preview mode in dreamweaver is not 100% reliable. nor will it match what you see in all browsers. it’s really hard for me to view your source embedded in creative cow source. your best bet is to keep at it on your end and/or get a temp hosting plan set up for your development purposes. it’s much more reliable than the dreamweaver preview mode anyway… :-/
a good cheap host is bluehost.com, and you don’t need a domain to get a plan set up, so you can get your site up and running and then tie a domain to it later on.
sitruc
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hello…
your html didn’t show up on the screen so i viewed the source of the page to look at it and it had a br tag after every line – don’t know if that’s your code or the cow’s…
it is really very hard to debug html without seeing it in original form as a full presentation. there are debugging tools that can be used that save lots of time (try the firebug extension in ff, for example)…where are you planning on hosting the site once it is done? or are you just playing around to learn?
sitruc
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hello…
ya – looking at snippets inline here isn’t working – for example, there are a ton of break tags (one after every line, it looks like) – if those are in your original page, they can be a culprit – but they might be added here after you posted – hard to say.
can you post the page and graphics to a server so that i can look at as a site? then it’s much easier to debug…
sitruc
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if you post the page (not an image – the actual page with code), i can look at it for you…otherwise it’s very hard to guess as to what it could be…
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hello…
hope you feel better soon – that sounds rough.
as for the space, it could be a lot of things – extra html, margins, padding, etc…hard to say without seeing source. make sure the margins and padding are zero for each element on either side and make sure that there’s no extra br tags or the likes in between them…
sitruc