 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
By Jim Trageser
Okay, okay – turnabout is fair play. It's just a bit uncomfortable being on the receiving end of reviews. Still, I volunteered when I opened my Web page (http://www.trageser.com) up to you all and asked for reviews. Here are your comments:
John Livingston wrote: "In today's ocean of web pages, content is king. While the Trageser World Headquarters isn't king of content, with only two pages being available to view, it does provide some interesting links. I didn't follow them all, but the one to Entisoft (http://entisoft.earthlink.net) was interesting. ... I never knew that Trageser was the 48,986th most popular last name in the country.
"Other, more interesting, links included places such as NASA, Win95.com and Disney. As for actual design of the site, it was well constructed, making good use of tables and color combinations. After having visited some difficult-to-read sites, the solid background with contrasting colors made for easy reading.
"In all, it wasn't too interesting. Definitely not a site worth going to unless you had a specific purpose for being there. But then again, that's the way 90 percent of most Web sites are. Stagnant, unchanging, noninteractive space cluttering up the web. A good web site should have a combination of content, changing information to bring a visitor back, and at least a guest book for interactivity."
Ouch! But fair. Ed Olmos wrote: "The web page loads fast. Good readability. Wonderfully devoid of the usual useless trivia seen on many home pages. Has a few links to some interesting sites."
I built the page as a test bed for teaching myself basic html>, and to be honest, there isn't a lot there. I have posted back ComputorEdge columns (not as up to date as it should be, though), and expanded the number of music links.
What I found in building my page is that it's both easier and harder than I imagined. It was much easier to get a basic page up than I anticipated. I used the built-in editor in Netscape Navigator Gold v.3, as well as building some elements with Microsoft's FrontPage. FrontPage does some things much better than Netscape – but Netscape's new version 4, renamed Communicator and now out in beta (www.netscape.com), catches up. I found both much easier to use than HotDog or Corel's Web Designer. Netscape also tends to insert absolute file names instead of relational, so that half the time when you post to your Web directory on the server the html> doc still contains a c: drive location for the files (i.e., "file=c:\\\web\sunset.gif").
But that's easy stuff to sort out in a text editor; what's really hard is coming up with a graphical look that's inviting and pleasant. I'm no artist, no designer, and the Web's no different than any other visual medium in that you still need talent to take advantage of all the wonderful tools the software has.