I don't really notice a fresh page load taking anything more than a second. I can see that being an issue if you were say, using IE 7 or anything else with a classic interperted javascript engine but it's 2014.
The only issue I have with that argument is that this is a site for abandonware. So it's possible someone want to browse the site on old hardware and in old browsers.
I don't really notice a fresh page load taking anything more than a second. I can see that being an issue if you were say, using IE 7 or anything else with a classic interperted javascript engine but it's 2014.
The only issue I have with that argument is that this is a site for abandonware. So it's possible someone want to browse the site on old hardware and in old browsers.
That may be, but I think if he should've mentioned what browser he was using before making some of the comments he made.
I don't really notice a fresh page load taking anything more than a second. I can see that being an issue if you were say, using IE 7 or anything else with a classic interperted javascript engine but it's 2014.
The only issue I have with that argument is that this is a site for abandonware. So it's possible someone want to browse the site on old hardware and in old browsers.
Another forum I browse decided it wasn't worth giving up SSL for safety in exchange for the novelty of browsing on Netscape 3.
I just started in on that rewrite I mentioned when I came across this:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, user-scalable=no, maximum-scale=1">
You say you're not worrying about mobile? Well it shows... you disabled zooming. That is NOT what one should EVER declare for a viewport meta as no user scaling and a maximum scale means mobile users can't zoom at all... making the site even less useful and probably a contributor to why the bootcrap layout is broken here.
You probably meant to say this:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; height=device-height; initial-scale=1.0" />
Which tells mobile not to lie (as much, thanks retina :( ) about their width and height and not to start out with an auto-zoom because as a designer you know what you are doing. Setting user-scalable to no and maximum scale to 1 isn't just ignoring mobile, it's a giant middle finger to mobile users worse than the giant middle finger Microsoft gave to desktop users with Windows 8.
Is wide open for easy access to the gooey bits and pieces.
I took a number of stylistic liberties in addressing the various issues. The colours were lightened to the accessibility minimums as per the WCAG, EGA/VGA specifications, and of course the usability guides created by Apple, Microsoft and IBM during their short lived collaboration.
Aka:
Y = 29.9% Red + 58.7% Green + 11.4% Blue
Where if your background and foreground colours are less than 50%, it's illegible to a lot of people, and really the ideal should be 75% or more thanks to font smoothing technologies throwing a monkey-wrench in the works. Fun thing is, if you follow these rules not only do you end up with less legibility issues for normal sighted people, it's also impossible to come up with colour combinations the colour blind can't see either.
I tried to stay true to your intent, though I went with a darker (and off-hue blue-shifted) background behind the content to help with the contrasts, leading to transparency and colour/inset shadows to the heading to make the division clearer. I also took the 'edge' off the yellow by dropping some green and adding some blue to it -- which kind of gives it more of a "amber" feel -- which I ran with on the headings since the orange had to be increased to meet the minimums. The red I brought up to CGA light red (#F55) as that's really the minimum for a black background on legibility, since red is -- as the formula above shows -- less than a third the visible luminance total. I also kept the underscores on content area links, since I'm more about accessibility than I am the artsy fartsy "oh noes, underscores".
As all good layouts should be, it's elastic (%/em fonts), semi-fluid (max-width) and responsive. It also gracefully degrades to a fixed width for IE6/earlier, and I went the extra mile and put some IE5 compatibility in. Anything pre-IE9 it won't look perfect, but it will at least be usable.
11.1k of markup, 6.6k of CSS. I also rescaled the "no XP" image down to the size it's actually being used at, so it's only 3k instead of 100k.
I axed the sticky header because that's just annoying on smaller displays (like my netbook) -- it's "gee ain't it neat" nonsense that gets in the way of what's important -- delivering content to users....
Depending on the sub-pages content sizes it might not be a bad idea to add 100% min-height layout to it so the footer is forced to bottom. (I might add that later if I get bored... or stuck on my main project, getting my blasted CMS sound drivers working right)
The semantic markup properly gracefully degrades CSS off, Images Off, or a combination of both. Be sure to try it at different screen widths (just make your browser window smaller) to see the responsiveness in action.
... and that's why I think bootcrap is a giant steaming pile that too many people are walking through and smearing on the carpets of their sites -- well, that and the fact it actively encourages the use of presentational classes, at which point you might as well go back to writing HTML 3.2 and pretend CSS didn't exist...
But then that's the target audience of things like bootcrap and HTML 5 -- the people who vomit up HTML 3.2 and the host of proprietary tags that followed, and until recently were slapping 4 tranny on it. Now people get to slap 5 Lip-service around the same outdated coding methodologies and pat each-other on the back over how "modern" they are.
Why when people call HTML 5 "the future" I go "Really? Looks like the worst of 1997 to me!" -- you mix it with Bootstrap, and you're shooting yourself in the groin before even adding content to the markup. Though properly written pages should be doing it the other way around -- adding markup to the content, then CSS to the markup and content. Dicking around with what it looks like before you have semantic markup is putting the cart before the horse!
Is wide open for easy access to the gooey bits and pieces.
At a glance, that looks pretty good in my thing-a-majig. I'm not going to bother anyone with issues in my older versions, but I do use Seamonkey 1.1.20 and Opera 10.10 quite a bit.
Is wide open for easy access to the gooey bits and pieces.
I took a number of stylistic liberties in addressing the various issues. The colours were lightened to the accessibility minimums as per the WCAG, EGA/VGA specifications, and of course the usability guides created by Apple, Microsoft and IBM during their short lived collaboration.
Aka:
Y = 29.9% Red + 58.7% Green + 11.4% Blue
Where if your background and foreground colours are less than 50%, it's illegible to a lot of people, and really the ideal should be 75% or more thanks to font smoothing technologies throwing a monkey-wrench in the works. Fun thing is, if you follow these rules not only do you end up with less legibility issues for normal sighted people, it's also impossible to come up with colour combinations the colour blind can't see either.
I tried to stay true to your intent, though I went with a darker (and off-hue blue-shifted) background behind the content to help with the contrasts, leading to transparency and colour/inset shadows to the heading to make the division clearer. I also took the 'edge' off the yellow by dropping some green and adding some blue to it -- which kind of gives it more of a "amber" feel -- which I ran with on the headings since the orange had to be increased to meet the minimums. The red I brought up to CGA light red (#F55) as that's really the minimum for a black background on legibility, since red is -- as the formula above shows -- less than a third the visible luminance total. I also kept the underscores on content area links, since I'm more about accessibility than I am the artsy fartsy "oh noes, underscores".
As all good layouts should be, it's elastic (%/em fonts), semi-fluid (max-width) and responsive. It also gracefully degrades to a fixed width for IE6/earlier, and I went the extra mile and put some IE5 compatibility in. Anything pre-IE9 it won't look perfect, but it will at least be usable.
That's actually pretty decent. I'm pretty impressed.
Personally I've tried to stay out of webdesign. That might change soon as I'm tired of dealing with the hack-magnet called WordPress. If I did something from scratch, I'd likely be doing some backend using Perl (insert cringes from people) along with bare bones html as a front end (I never managed to master using tables or anything in my short time doing web design years ago and CSS was just starting to take off).
In regards to your content remark earlier about software being in the wrong category, and I'm addressing this to everybody, if anyone notices things like that or wants to add in information (and aren't a VIP), you can PM any of the staff (I check nightly if I'm at home) or send an email to the address listed in the about page and I'll add it in when I see the message. There's a lot of software that we were getting messages about in regards to "what is this software in folder x" or "what's the requirements for x to run on?" and I think by organizing the software in a way that we can provide info would solve a lot of questions asked. There's other content that's in the pipeline for coming out later but the focus right now is just what's already public.
As for the ads situation, the staff is not in total agreement with the situation and I'll leave it at that.
Is wide open for easy access to the gooey bits and pieces.
That design gave me headache.
EDIT: I would like to see this site having a tutorial section so idiots who can't use their brain and search for it on the internet, can look for it here.
EDIT: I would like to see this site having a tutorial section so idiots who can't use their brain and search for it on the internet, can look for it here.
In the pipeline. I have the 95 tutorial I did that's on here which needs to be revised, and I was going to do one for a few others too, like 3.11 and include the drivers needed (since most "driver" websites are traps).
I don't blame you -- particularly right now with the idiocy of people screwing around drawing goofy pictures in photoshop before they even know what's going on the page, completely ignorant of emissive colourspace, HTML, CSS or even accessibility and UI design -- then having the giant set of brass to call themselves "designers". Most such ignorant halfwits having no business designing jack for anybody.
You look at the big success stories of the Internet -- Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, e-Bay -- do these look like they have some artist spanking it on the screen and calling it "design"? NOT exactly what you'd call a visual tour-de-force. They have content of value presented in a straightforward manner; even when they are an accessibility mess and poorly written code bloat, their emphasis is on what really matters: The content the user came to the site to get.
A concept lost on most of the Photoshop jockeys out there making wild claims that they know the first blasted thing about building a website.
That might change soon as I'm tired of dealing with the hack-magnet called WordPress.
That's a good description of it. To be brutally frank the developers behind wordpress -- OR WORSE the developers who make mods and skins for it -- generally don't know enough about HTML, CSS, PHP, or mySQL, much less advanced topics like *SHOCK* security to be writing ANY of that. I actually wonder how in the hell that steaming pile of manure has gotten as popular as it has; the only two reasons I can figure are ignorance, apathy, and laziness.
I mean, the stock HTML reeks of "I can haz intarnets" coding with the endless pointless classes and absolute URI's on everything, much less the dozens of "scripts for nothing"... the PHP reeks of "security, what's that?" with it STILL using mysql_ functions despite our being told for close to eight years to stop using it, with them FINALLY adding giant red warning boxes to the manual waving us off from it's use -- but that's just the tip of the iceberg; endless entry vectors with NO real scope security, mated to outright ignorant halfwit bull like putting the SQL hostname, username and password into DEFINE and a global scope live database connection? Herpafreakingderp if you know the first thing about security.
If I did something from scratch, I'd likely be doing some backend using Perl (insert cringes from people)
Only reason I cringe at Perl is the pain in the ass it is to get it working on a website on modern servers; a laugh since it's basically all that was available long ago. If you're running you're own dedicated server or VPS, you can go that route -- don't expect to be able to run perl on many modern shared hosts as it's now blocked and/or unavailable. Simple fact is, the world has moved on to PHP. The laugh being people on things like Ruby try to claim that the world is moving away from PHP, and they're mostly full of it. But again, assertion; you spread the same lie often enough and fervently enough, people assume it's the truth. See 99.99% of the garbage spewed forth from so called SEO "experts".
I'd REALLY suggest PHP just because you get stuck it has better documentation and you are more likely to get meaningful help on forums, and it integrates to SQL engines far, far easier -- with the security headaches a thing of the past if you use PDO instead of the mysql_ functions. PDO also means you can talk to a whole slew of different DB engines instead of just mySQL using the same engines. You practice something called "named queries" and use prepared queries, you can further up the security and write one codebase that can easily be targeted to multiple DB engines at once!
along with bare bones html as a front end (I never managed to master using tables or anything in my short time doing web design years ago and CSS was just starting to take off).
Well if you skip the HTML 5 idiocy and gibberish, and go with the ACTUAL recommendation doctypes of HTML 4 STRICT or XHTML 1.0 STRICT, it's far easier to deal with than you might think... at least in terms of writing the HTML. The separation of presentation from content and using the tags to say what things ARE, NOT what they look like actually speeds up development and makes life easier -- ESPECIALLY if you skip the gooftarded framework idiocy (blueprint, bootcrap, etc).
CSS is the "hard part" -- but mostly that's just a conceptual thing. It's actually pretty easy and most of the 'hard stuff' is supporting legacy versions of IE... at least if you take the time to again practice separation of presentation from content, and don't do anything STUPID like use the STYLE tag or STYLE attribute; the former IMHO should be removed from the specification entirely, the latter should be deprecated for all but the rarest of corner cases. (like using WIDTH to show data on something like a graph). If you use the HTML to say what things ARE, UA's can best determine how to convey that -- that's the entire reason HTML even came into existence in the first place! You can then use media targets to customize that appearance and media queries to even further refine it to the capabilities of whatever it's being shown on.
Which is why saying things like class="col12" or class="red" is just as idiotic and outdated as using FONT tags and tables for layout. Much like HTML 5's garbage ASIDE and NAV tags
In regards to your content remark earlier about software being in the wrong category
I would think some software might fit multiple categories -- to the point it might be better to have 'tags' instead of or in supplement to 'categories'.
Information on target platform, minimum CPU, memory requirements -- that sounds great too. That's time to break out a custom database instead of trying to pound that square peg into the round hole with something like turdpress.
Like the various Borland languages the lines get blurred with Borland Pascal 7 since it can target windows 3.x and DOS... while Turbo Pascal 7 is strictly DOS.
As for the ads situation, the staff is not in total agreement with the situation and I'll leave it at that.
That's most always the case when it comes to advertising. Personally I trust advertisers about as far as I can throw the big stick -- but that's because I'm a pre dot-com burst vet; where we saw the full ugliness of advertisers and the "advertising can pay for everything" mentality at it's predatory worst... my own recent experiments show that nothing has changed on that front; the sites I have put adverts on the past year likely having them removed by end of year; most of them not even covering the labor of putting them on said sites despite really good traffic numbers.
Monetizing traffic is always the hard part. More so on an archive of dubious legality and grey-area morality such as this one.
along with bare bones html as a front end (I never managed to master using tables or anything in my short time doing web design years ago and CSS was just starting to take off).
Well if you skip the HTML 5 idiocy and gibberish, and go with the ACTUAL recommendation doctypes of HTML 4 STRICT or XHTML 1.0 STRICT, it's far easier to deal with than you might think... at least in terms of writing the HTML. The separation of presentation from content and using the tags to say what things ARE, NOT what they look like actually speeds up development and makes life easier -- ESPECIALLY if you skip the gooftarded framework idiocy (blueprint, bootcrap, etc).
CSS is the "hard part" -- but mostly that's just a conceptual thing. It's actually pretty easy and most of the 'hard stuff' is supporting legacy versions of IE... at least if you take the time to again practice separation of presentation from content, and don't do anything STUPID like use the STYLE tag or STYLE attribute; the former IMHO should be removed from the specification entirely, the latter should be deprecated for all but the rarest of corner cases. (like using WIDTH to show data on something like a graph). If you use the HTML to say what things ARE, UA's can best determine how to convey that -- that's the entire reason HTML even came into existence in the first place! You can then use media targets to customize that appearance and media queries to even further refine it to the capabilities of whatever it's being shown on.
Which is why saying things like class="col12" or class="red" is just as idiotic and outdated as using FONT tags and tables for layout. Much like HTML 5's garbage ASIDE and NAV tags
I do agree that the hard part about css is supporting all the old versions of browsers that might be roaming around out there. I too code websites but it's for my blog. HTML 5 isn't all that stupid, I think html 4.01 has a lot of good features / support for tags. I haven't got into the whole XHTML, but I hope to get started/ learning on it soon.
I've not really at all had much time to take a look at anything even minor on WinWorld, but..
Thanks for taking the time to create that markup deathshadow. I appreitate the fact that it's clean and legible and will likely end up incorporating certain elements of it into our design. With that said however, I'm not at all a fan of how that header and footer is put together. Honestly looking at that the first thing I thought was who peed on my monitor? The navigation bar is fine for not being logged in although I make use of the Bootstrap drop-downs when logged in, and I make use of the Modal and a navs elsewhere. Navs I could create from scratch although drop-downs, modal dialogs and the rest of the things I will need to do other things I will still need bootstrap for without going through a huge endeavor of coding something decent from scratch. All of those classes which you think throw CSS out the window are A) backed *by* CSS and useful should I want to have multiple themes as an option. While a 2nd theme doesn't exist right now, the code to support such is mostly there. I would eventually like to have a fallback version that is usable on old browsers. As it stands now the site is pretty well usable in something like Links and should be decent with a screen reader. We can certainly add the sr-only tags to help out with those.
One of the main things I need Bootstrap for is the virtual machine control panel. I would still like to go through with this eventually. We have the code and technology we just lack the infrastructure, well rather the funding for it. This is why those ads shown up although I'm not at all impressed with the ad network's performance and will likely end up removing them. I'm very open to having a conversation with the rest of the staff on how to approach this, however nobody has really wanted to propose anything somewhat sustainable.
The new site is absolutely not perfect but it's a good start which for the most part has been well received. It is database driven and developed in two parts, a back-end framework and then the front-end site. The former is separate and usable for other things beyond WinWorld. With this design yes, we very much did approach it with a code/design first, populate the DB later.
Right now while mobile is in the pipeline it's not first and foremost. Right now our hits are about 95% desktop and I have other things that need to be done. I think we have all faced facts by now and understand our options with the forum situation are nil. I want three things out of our forum system
* Something that works
* Something that feels modern
* All of our data preserved.
Moving off phpBB is complicated enough as is but compounding the issue is the fact we run it on PostgreSQL. I really like IPB and would not at all mind switching to it if I knew we could preserve all of our current data. I'm not entirely certain with the transition to MySQL, on another forum system, with our corrupted database will succeed. In fact, I am pretty doubtful. So with that said my next biggest priority is building a forum system into the new site and then importing WinBoards. This is an extremely major task that will take a lot of planning and coding on my end.
I've invested a signifiant amount of time into the new site and frankly, it's paid off traffic wise. Our individual page views are sustaining at 7k+ a day, our unique sessions have slightly gone up and our bounce rate has sustained it's 25-30% loss. It's certainly got some kinks to be ironed out but it's working great. Once we get more tutorials and content out of the pipeline and live we'll be in even better shape. The contributions system has been specifically well received and we have a huge backlog of items that need processing. Thanks guys, keep them coming!
Moving off phpBB is complicated enough as is but compounding the issue is the fact we run it on PostgreSQL. I really like IPB and would not at all mind switching to it if I knew we could preserve all of our current data. I'm not entirely certain with the transition to MySQL, on another forum system, with our corrupted database will succeed
I'm pretty sure over the years most of us have at one time tried to fix the DB, I'm pretty sure it's too far gone to fix the corruption on that many posts, short of someone importing it by hand -- which is simply ridiculous.
Moving off phpBB is complicated enough as is but compounding the issue is the fact we run it on PostgreSQL. I really like IPB and would not at all mind switching to it if I knew we could preserve all of our current data. I'm not entirely certain with the transition to MySQL, on another forum system, with our corrupted database will succeed
I'm pretty sure over the years most of us have at one time tried to fix the DB, I'm pretty sure it's too far gone to fix the corruption on that many posts, short of someone importing it by hand -- which is simply ridiculous.
Doing it entirely by hand would be ridiculous, but maybe you could write a script to identify inconsistencies / corruptions and present them for review / fix.
I initially had an issue when registering on here, it seems to have ironed out now. The issue was it wouldn't send a confirmation email, when i pressed the button it did nothing, until after about a half an hour of pressing it.
I initially had an issue when registering on here, it seems to have ironed out now. The issue was it wouldn't send a confirmation email, when i pressed the button it did nothing, until after about a half an hour of pressing it.
Please don't do stupid things like click buttons over and over.
Anyway I've made some changes to the site. The headers have been re-arranged where they start with <h2> on each page and drop down and I'll eventually add an sr-only h1 to the header. The grey colour and navbar have been brightened up to the off-blue white color.
The Applications library list has been revised from two-column to one with pagination and a filter tool. Downloads on the library pages are now also listed in tables instead of two-column.
Most of the important font sizes have been adjuted to pt and the rest will come when I'm more awake sometime.
Nice work on the new design - it's not perfect but it's certainly prettier than the old one. Yes, I liked the old browsing style, but this one has a lot more potential and I like the screenshots and info pages a lot.
I too had an issue with activation - I had manually send the activation email and it then came through instantly.
The only thing I really want to see is a search bar - that would make it great. I was looking for MSBOB earlier and couldn't find it, so a search engine would be great.
I found it in the end using a google search of:
microsoft bob site:winworldpc.com
Anyway, I look forward to seeing the future of this site. Oh and hi all - just decided to register on the forum!
I don't really notice a fresh page load taking anything more than a second. I can see that being an issue if you were say, using IE 7 or anything else with a classic interperted javascript engine but it's 2014.
The only issue I have with that argument is that this is a site for abandonware. So it's possible someone want to browse the site on old hardware and in old browsers.
Another forum I browse decided it wasn't worth giving up SSL for safety in exchange for the novelty of browsing on Netscape 3.
The download for a Windows 9x version saved a copy of the home page for me....
Comments
The only issue I have with that argument is that this is a site for abandonware. So it's possible someone want to browse the site on old hardware and in old browsers.
That may be, but I think if he should've mentioned what browser he was using before making some of the comments he made.
Another forum I browse decided it wasn't worth giving up SSL for safety in exchange for the novelty of browsing on Netscape 3.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, user-scalable=no, maximum-scale=1">
You say you're not worrying about mobile? Well it shows... you disabled zooming. That is NOT what one should EVER declare for a viewport meta as no user scaling and a maximum scale means mobile users can't zoom at all... making the site even less useful and probably a contributor to why the bootcrap layout is broken here.
You probably meant to say this:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; height=device-height; initial-scale=1.0" />
Which tells mobile not to lie (as much, thanks retina :( ) about their width and height and not to start out with an auto-zoom because as a designer you know what you are doing. Setting user-scalable to no and maximum scale to 1 isn't just ignoring mobile, it's a giant middle finger to mobile users worse than the giant middle finger Microsoft gave to desktop users with Windows 8.
-- edit --
Just came across another bit of fun:
No TR, TD + B doing TH's job, no SCOPE.
Giving mobile addicts the middle finger is fun because they never look away from their retarded touchscreens. Maybe I should start.
(BTW, Am I the only one of my age who hates touch technology? Probably.)
http://www.cutcodedown.com/for_others/w ... plate.html
As with all my examples, the directory:
http://www.cutcodedown.com/for_others/winWorld/
Is wide open for easy access to the gooey bits and pieces.
I took a number of stylistic liberties in addressing the various issues. The colours were lightened to the accessibility minimums as per the WCAG, EGA/VGA specifications, and of course the usability guides created by Apple, Microsoft and IBM during their short lived collaboration.
Aka:
Y = 29.9% Red + 58.7% Green + 11.4% Blue
Where if your background and foreground colours are less than 50%, it's illegible to a lot of people, and really the ideal should be 75% or more thanks to font smoothing technologies throwing a monkey-wrench in the works. Fun thing is, if you follow these rules not only do you end up with less legibility issues for normal sighted people, it's also impossible to come up with colour combinations the colour blind can't see either.
I tried to stay true to your intent, though I went with a darker (and off-hue blue-shifted) background behind the content to help with the contrasts, leading to transparency and colour/inset shadows to the heading to make the division clearer. I also took the 'edge' off the yellow by dropping some green and adding some blue to it -- which kind of gives it more of a "amber" feel -- which I ran with on the headings since the orange had to be increased to meet the minimums. The red I brought up to CGA light red (#F55) as that's really the minimum for a black background on legibility, since red is -- as the formula above shows -- less than a third the visible luminance total. I also kept the underscores on content area links, since I'm more about accessibility than I am the artsy fartsy "oh noes, underscores".
As all good layouts should be, it's elastic (%/em fonts), semi-fluid (max-width) and responsive. It also gracefully degrades to a fixed width for IE6/earlier, and I went the extra mile and put some IE5 compatibility in. Anything pre-IE9 it won't look perfect, but it will at least be usable.
11.1k of markup, 6.6k of CSS. I also rescaled the "no XP" image down to the size it's actually being used at, so it's only 3k instead of 100k.
I axed the sticky header because that's just annoying on smaller displays (like my netbook) -- it's "gee ain't it neat" nonsense that gets in the way of what's important -- delivering content to users....
Depending on the sub-pages content sizes it might not be a bad idea to add 100% min-height layout to it so the footer is forced to bottom. (I might add that later if I get bored... or stuck on my main project, getting my blasted CMS sound drivers working right)
The semantic markup properly gracefully degrades CSS off, Images Off, or a combination of both. Be sure to try it at different screen widths (just make your browser window smaller) to see the responsiveness in action.
... and that's why I think bootcrap is a giant steaming pile that too many people are walking through and smearing on the carpets of their sites -- well, that and the fact it actively encourages the use of presentational classes, at which point you might as well go back to writing HTML 3.2 and pretend CSS didn't exist...
But then that's the target audience of things like bootcrap and HTML 5 -- the people who vomit up HTML 3.2 and the host of proprietary tags that followed, and until recently were slapping 4 tranny on it. Now people get to slap 5 Lip-service around the same outdated coding methodologies and pat each-other on the back over how "modern" they are.
Why when people call HTML 5 "the future" I go "Really? Looks like the worst of 1997 to me!" -- you mix it with Bootstrap, and you're shooting yourself in the groin before even adding content to the markup. Though properly written pages should be doing it the other way around -- adding markup to the content, then CSS to the markup and content. Dicking around with what it looks like before you have semantic markup is putting the cart before the horse!
At a glance, that looks pretty good in my thing-a-majig. I'm not going to bother anyone with issues in my older versions, but I do use Seamonkey 1.1.20 and Opera 10.10 quite a bit.
That's actually pretty decent. I'm pretty impressed.
Personally I've tried to stay out of webdesign. That might change soon as I'm tired of dealing with the hack-magnet called WordPress. If I did something from scratch, I'd likely be doing some backend using Perl (insert cringes from people) along with bare bones html as a front end (I never managed to master using tables or anything in my short time doing web design years ago and CSS was just starting to take off).
In regards to your content remark earlier about software being in the wrong category, and I'm addressing this to everybody, if anyone notices things like that or wants to add in information (and aren't a VIP), you can PM any of the staff (I check nightly if I'm at home) or send an email to the address listed in the about page and I'll add it in when I see the message. There's a lot of software that we were getting messages about in regards to "what is this software in folder x" or "what's the requirements for x to run on?" and I think by organizing the software in a way that we can provide info would solve a lot of questions asked. There's other content that's in the pipeline for coming out later but the focus right now is just what's already public.
As for the ads situation, the staff is not in total agreement with the situation and I'll leave it at that.
That design gave me headache.
EDIT: I would like to see this site having a tutorial section so idiots who can't use their brain and search for it on the internet, can look for it here.
You look at the big success stories of the Internet -- Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, e-Bay -- do these look like they have some artist spanking it on the screen and calling it "design"? NOT exactly what you'd call a visual tour-de-force. They have content of value presented in a straightforward manner; even when they are an accessibility mess and poorly written code bloat, their emphasis is on what really matters: The content the user came to the site to get.
A concept lost on most of the Photoshop jockeys out there making wild claims that they know the first blasted thing about building a website.
That's a good description of it. To be brutally frank the developers behind wordpress -- OR WORSE the developers who make mods and skins for it -- generally don't know enough about HTML, CSS, PHP, or mySQL, much less advanced topics like *SHOCK* security to be writing ANY of that. I actually wonder how in the hell that steaming pile of manure has gotten as popular as it has; the only two reasons I can figure are ignorance, apathy, and laziness.
I mean, the stock HTML reeks of "I can haz intarnets" coding with the endless pointless classes and absolute URI's on everything, much less the dozens of "scripts for nothing"... the PHP reeks of "security, what's that?" with it STILL using mysql_ functions despite our being told for close to eight years to stop using it, with them FINALLY adding giant red warning boxes to the manual waving us off from it's use -- but that's just the tip of the iceberg; endless entry vectors with NO real scope security, mated to outright ignorant halfwit bull like putting the SQL hostname, username and password into DEFINE and a global scope live database connection? Herpafreakingderp if you know the first thing about security.
Only reason I cringe at Perl is the pain in the ass it is to get it working on a website on modern servers; a laugh since it's basically all that was available long ago. If you're running you're own dedicated server or VPS, you can go that route -- don't expect to be able to run perl on many modern shared hosts as it's now blocked and/or unavailable. Simple fact is, the world has moved on to PHP. The laugh being people on things like Ruby try to claim that the world is moving away from PHP, and they're mostly full of it. But again, assertion; you spread the same lie often enough and fervently enough, people assume it's the truth. See 99.99% of the garbage spewed forth from so called SEO "experts".
I'd REALLY suggest PHP just because you get stuck it has better documentation and you are more likely to get meaningful help on forums, and it integrates to SQL engines far, far easier -- with the security headaches a thing of the past if you use PDO instead of the mysql_ functions. PDO also means you can talk to a whole slew of different DB engines instead of just mySQL using the same engines. You practice something called "named queries" and use prepared queries, you can further up the security and write one codebase that can easily be targeted to multiple DB engines at once!
Well if you skip the HTML 5 idiocy and gibberish, and go with the ACTUAL recommendation doctypes of HTML 4 STRICT or XHTML 1.0 STRICT, it's far easier to deal with than you might think... at least in terms of writing the HTML. The separation of presentation from content and using the tags to say what things ARE, NOT what they look like actually speeds up development and makes life easier -- ESPECIALLY if you skip the gooftarded framework idiocy (blueprint, bootcrap, etc).
CSS is the "hard part" -- but mostly that's just a conceptual thing. It's actually pretty easy and most of the 'hard stuff' is supporting legacy versions of IE... at least if you take the time to again practice separation of presentation from content, and don't do anything STUPID like use the STYLE tag or STYLE attribute; the former IMHO should be removed from the specification entirely, the latter should be deprecated for all but the rarest of corner cases. (like using WIDTH to show data on something like a graph). If you use the HTML to say what things ARE, UA's can best determine how to convey that -- that's the entire reason HTML even came into existence in the first place! You can then use media targets to customize that appearance and media queries to even further refine it to the capabilities of whatever it's being shown on.
Which is why saying things like class="col12" or class="red" is just as idiotic and outdated as using FONT tags and tables for layout. Much like HTML 5's garbage ASIDE and NAV tags
I would think some software might fit multiple categories -- to the point it might be better to have 'tags' instead of or in supplement to 'categories'.
Information on target platform, minimum CPU, memory requirements -- that sounds great too. That's time to break out a custom database instead of trying to pound that square peg into the round hole with something like turdpress.
Like the various Borland languages the lines get blurred with Borland Pascal 7 since it can target windows 3.x and DOS... while Turbo Pascal 7 is strictly DOS.
That's most always the case when it comes to advertising. Personally I trust advertisers about as far as I can throw the big stick -- but that's because I'm a pre dot-com burst vet; where we saw the full ugliness of advertisers and the "advertising can pay for everything" mentality at it's predatory worst... my own recent experiments show that nothing has changed on that front; the sites I have put adverts on the past year likely having them removed by end of year; most of them not even covering the labor of putting them on said sites despite really good traffic numbers.
Monetizing traffic is always the hard part. More so on an archive of dubious legality and grey-area morality such as this one.
Thanks for taking the time to create that markup deathshadow. I appreitate the fact that it's clean and legible and will likely end up incorporating certain elements of it into our design. With that said however, I'm not at all a fan of how that header and footer is put together. Honestly looking at that the first thing I thought was who peed on my monitor? The navigation bar is fine for not being logged in although I make use of the Bootstrap drop-downs when logged in, and I make use of the Modal and a navs elsewhere. Navs I could create from scratch although drop-downs, modal dialogs and the rest of the things I will need to do other things I will still need bootstrap for without going through a huge endeavor of coding something decent from scratch. All of those classes which you think throw CSS out the window are A) backed *by* CSS and
One of the main things I need Bootstrap for is the virtual machine control panel. I would still like to go through with this eventually. We have the code and technology we just lack the infrastructure, well rather the funding for it. This is why those ads shown up although I'm not at all impressed with the ad network's performance and will likely end up removing them. I'm very open to having a conversation with the rest of the staff on how to approach this, however nobody has really wanted to propose anything somewhat sustainable.
The new site is absolutely not perfect but it's a good start which for the most part has been well received. It is database driven and developed in two parts, a back-end framework and then the front-end site. The former is separate and usable for other things beyond WinWorld. With this design yes, we very much did approach it with a code/design first, populate the DB later.
Right now while mobile is in the pipeline it's not first and foremost. Right now our hits are about 95% desktop and I have other things that need to be done. I think we have all faced facts by now and understand our options with the forum situation are nil. I want three things out of our forum system
* Something that works
* Something that feels modern
* All of our data preserved.
Moving off phpBB is complicated enough as is but compounding the issue is the fact we run it on PostgreSQL. I really like IPB and would not at all mind switching to it if I knew we could preserve all of our current data. I'm not entirely certain with the transition to MySQL, on another forum system, with our corrupted database will succeed. In fact, I am pretty doubtful. So with that said my next biggest priority is building a forum system into the new site and then importing WinBoards. This is an extremely major task that will take a lot of planning and coding on my end.
I've invested a signifiant amount of time into the new site and frankly, it's paid off traffic wise. Our individual page views are sustaining at 7k+ a day, our unique sessions have slightly gone up and our bounce rate has sustained it's 25-30% loss. It's certainly got some kinks to be ironed out but it's working great. Once we get more tutorials and content out of the pipeline and live we'll be in even better shape. The contributions system has been specifically well received and we have a huge backlog of items that need processing. Thanks guys, keep them coming!
I'm pretty sure over the years most of us have at one time tried to fix the DB, I'm pretty sure it's too far gone to fix the corruption on that many posts, short of someone importing it by hand -- which is simply ridiculous.
Doing it entirely by hand would be ridiculous, but maybe you could write a script to identify inconsistencies / corruptions and present them for review / fix.
Please don't do stupid things like click buttons over and over.
Anyway I've made some changes to the site. The headers have been re-arranged where they start with <h2> on each page and drop down and I'll eventually add an sr-only h1 to the header. The grey colour and navbar have been brightened up to the off-blue white color.
The Applications library list has been revised from two-column to one with pagination and a filter tool. Downloads on the library pages are now also listed in tables instead of two-column.
Most of the important font sizes have been adjuted to pt and the rest will come when I'm more awake sometime.
I too had an issue with activation - I had manually send the activation email and it then came through instantly.
The only thing I really want to see is a search bar - that would make it great. I was looking for MSBOB earlier and couldn't find it, so a search engine would be great.
I found it in the end using a google search of:
Anyway, I look forward to seeing the future of this site. Oh and hi all - just decided to register on the forum!