I need help from unbiased folks before I do something rash like delete the whole site out of frustration. It’s not open yet, and it’s certainly not anything very important, so I could, but I’ve been working off and on for weeks, gathering content, and would rather not.
In the interest of posterity and tape-trading fans, I decided to make a non-commercial fan web site keeping track of information about an artist’s live shows (my gal Happy Rhodes).
I know next to nothing about style sheets and I haven’t really had a chance to learn much. I’ve cobbled together some style sheets from tutorials and a thread here on the dope, but I think I’ve gotten in over my head. The style sheets are messy and there are too many of them. They have things I don’t need and don’t have things I do need.
(Aside to say that I do very well realize that this is pre-school stuff, very very simplistic, but my tiny mind is having a hard time grasping it. I’m not a web designer, just a fan type with a web site. Please be kind to my mind.)
I guess I’ll start by telling you what I’m aiming for.
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A Home page (that I haven’t even started on yet) with links into the site.
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A Master Concert list of all the concerts she’s done. We’re not talking Greatful Dead here. There aren’t that many, but for people who are trying to get recordings of all of them, it’s nice to know the when/where/what. This is pretty much the way I want it.
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A Master Song list. Fans have favorites, and will want to get recordings of all the shows she sang this or that particular song. The layout if the way I want it, but some of the execution is bothersome.
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A primary page for basic information about the show (where, when) and a set list. This is basic, but it works fine.
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A secondary page for lineup, openers, any photos, photo links or anything else. I started out putting everything onto one page, but shows that had a lot of information cluttered up the main page too much. It seemed better to separate them. Basic but fine too.
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A Gallery page/site if a show had more than a couple of photos. I’ve been looking for a gallery program and haven’t found the perfect one yet. It’s been very frustrating.
Each of those things has its own style sheet. Somehow I don’t think that’s necessary.
I can’t think of anything else that might be needed, except for maybe a page specifically pertaining to galleries, since it’s not going to be obvious which shows have photos attached and which don’t. A page saying which shows have galleries might be worth thinking about.
I have a ways to go with content, but I’m getting there. I still have some pages to finish up and I have a lot of photos to add.
Here’s my problem, aesthetically: I didn’t want there to be a navigation bar on the left, I wanted it to be at the top and bottom. I’ve been playing around with style sheets as an alternative to image nav bars, but I don’t know well enough what I’m doing. They work, pretty much, but I’m not sure how. I stole a table from a different web site with the thought of incorporating the two.
I hate hate hate the look of underlines (I always have mine turned on “hover”) so I forced a no-underline rule for the fake nav bars. I still wanted people to know for sure that those things are hot links. I tried having them change color when mouseovered, but I didn’t like the look of that and I couldn’t get it to work consistantly. My current thing is having them change font size when mousedover (isn’t there a better name for that?) and it seems to work fine for every page except for the master song list, which presents a different problem.
Any tips or suggestions for look or content would be most welcome. Does the fake navagation bar look and work ok? Do the colors work? The whole reason I went with style sheets in the first place was so I could change the look of the site in an instant. A few keystrokes and the entire site could be white and blue instead of black and rust. Or I could change that picture of Happy on all the show pages to something else, or nothing at all, with one hightlight and hit of the space bar. I say this just to make clear that the look is subject to change.
I haven’t a lick of design sense, so this is not easy for me. All I wanted was a master list of what songs she’d performed, and over the last few weeks it grew into this keeping track of all the shows too project. Now I’m frustrated and bored with html and css, but I want to finish it. No one else is going to, and once it’s finished I don’t have to think about it anymore, all I have to do is add new shows when they happen.
Here’s my problem, technically: On the Master Song list page, I want the focus to be on the song titles, but I want the shows listed next to the song, so that someone can go to that page to see the rest of the set list. One way to focus on the song title is to make the show links tiny. There, if someone wants it, but small and out of the way. Via the mastersonglist.css style sheet, I made the links small, and I’m happy with the way it’s come out. The song titles are fine. The links are small and fine. The mouseover produces a slightly larger font and a rust highlight, and that’s fine.
What I’m not happy with is that the css makes the other links, in the first 2 paragraphs, and the nav bar, small also. I can’t figure out how to fix that. When I mouseover in the nav bar, the text gets bigger but it also makes the rest of the nav bar jump and the whole page move down. I hate that. How do I fix that?
Any tips or comments on any aspect of this site would be welcome.