Where there is water there will be all sorts of animals come to drink,
and where there is a lot of traffic there will be preditors in wait.

Well spoken, Grasshopper.

Well, I "went live" tonight. My site work officially moved out of the "test" folder and into the main.

http://www.spinland.biz

I incorporated several pieces of advice I've gotten from members here, and thanks for those. The gallery is a bit of a cop-out but I already have a full one elsewhere so figured I'd leverage that until I've had time to put CC's photo gallery software to good use.

One thing I'm sort of sketchy on is the links page set-up. In the old version I used tried-n-true (and now frowned upon by purists) tables to align the icons and the text areas perfectly. In VSD It seemed the best I could do was lay some guide lines, space the icons evenly between them, and then move the text boxes manually to even up with the icons. If I spaced the text boxes evenly it went by the actual text and not the box boundaries so they were spaced too far apart to line up properly.

Is there some magic to getting perfect line-ups between differing things like icons and text boxes, or do you just do like I did and lay down a lot of guide lines and use the keypad to nudge them around?

Anyway, comments, advice, whatevers are always welcome. I wanted to keep the overall feel spare and simple. My major focus is on showcasing the graphics, not on how fancy I can do web pages.

Hi Spinny
I notice a couple of things but must make an apology from the outset....... I do not have VSD actively installed on this computer right now to do any kind of checks, so bear with me.
In your COPYRIGHT page I see that, what looks as if it should be the copyright symbol, (©) has been replaced (in Firefox at least) by the little question mark. That should be fixed.

Then I want to pick up on your concerns with the links.......... yet again....... do your own checks on VSD as I can't recall exactly.......... but is there an x/y coordinates positioner? If so, you just nudge the elements into position using those as a guideline. Inevitably the very shape and size of each icon does mean that you are going to have to do a bit of maths to calculate the horizontal positions. Having said that, at first glance, they all seem to be fine. Another useful tool I often use is a pixel ruler which I picked up free. When opened up it overlays anything you have open in your browser and can be shifted around in a horizontal, or vertical position. If I can find the download url, I will add it in here later.

Obviously the guidelines you mention are an excellent alternative for squaring things up in VSD.

I would be inclined to remove the extra comment you have added in the Contact page which concerns your need to change the email address. Perhaps you added that comment during the construction phase only...... but for a professional site, those kind of comments are superfluous I think. It is becoming more common to see the email address convention you have used, and in most professional fields, no explanation would be necessary.

One of the things to remember is that good, clean web design........ in my humble opinion........ often takes longer than very full, busy pages. Those positive "empty" spaces are just as important as the graphic or text content so we mustn't expect to just "throw" something together and get it right... but should assume that it will take time and patience, and quite a few mistakes before it all comes together harmoniously.

ps. Notice that you like tabletop games! My brother is into them in a big way in the uk........ runs a little magazine for this favourite hobby too.

Pixel ruler (free download)
http://www.mioplanet.com/products/pixelruler/

Janys,

Thanks for all the great feedback!

On positioning, I don't know of any co-ordinates displays in VSD; maybe that'd be an idea for future releases? The guidelines were indeed extremely useful, no doubt why they're in there, I just wondered whether there were a more elegant way to do alignments between different object types. As I mentioned, the auto-spacing tools in VSD key on the actual text instead of the box so that complicates using them to match up with images (or buttons, or whatever). Your pixel ruler suggestion looks great, already downloaded a copy. Thanks!

On the copyright symbol, that's odd. In my FF and my IE it shows up as it should. I used the cheap approach and typed the text in MS Word, using their symbol, and pasted it in. I thought I got away with it because it worked fine in my tests. How do I insert the proper HTML code for the symbol into a text box in VSD? Do I just type in the code as text in line and it translates? I guess I'll try that this morning and see. If it doesn't work, any better methods?

Thanks again!

ETA: typing the HTML code into the text box didn't work, as I suspected. Still looking for a good way to display symbols in there using "proper" HTML instead of the Word cheat. Help?

Hello again Spinny
Have just done this screenshot for you to see the problem with the special characters. I will see if I can find the time later to get to my own VSD to take a look, but don't hold your breath!

Are you using a Mac? I only seem to see this problem with Mac users for some reason....... but yours could be the one that breaks that rule of course!

Anyway, I will try to check back later.......

ps. Just did a quick copy and paste of your copyright page into the CC HTML Editor and think that at the very outside you could possibly open up the page in the CC FTP Editor area and add in the correct html with special characters there...... then save it back to web. Just be warned that if you make further changes to that page locally, and then upload..... the changes you made online would probably be lost.
Here you can see what I did.
http://www.venicedigital.com/spinny.html

Yeah, that's funky all right. I use Windows XP, so I guess I'm a troublemaker all around. If you could, would you look at the index page again? There's a TM symbol after the intro slogan and I expect that's not displaying properly on your system, as well.

I think the work-around is to bag the text boxes altogether and insert HTML objects in their place, and put in the text as HTML instead of as raw text. I'm going to start a question thread in the VSD forum asking whether anyone has a better idea.

Many thanks yet again!

Spinny,
I just checked your copyright page in both IE and FF and the tm and copyright signs were there, they way they should be. All looked fine from here.

Cliff,

Thanks for the info. I wonder why they're not showing up for Janys? That's very puzzling to me.

Spinny,

I agree that it is puzzling. Here may be the answer:
When you copy/paste from some other program, you only allow the computers that have either those same fonts or special characters installed on their machines to view your characters or font.

Classic example. A site I help out with wanted a 'German' looking font on their web page. The owner of the site was kind enough to send me the 'font' because my computer did not have it. When I put the font into my Windows font folder, suddenly all the German font showed up correctly. Until then, it was probably Arial or Times New Roman or something 'default'.

Chances are you and I both have those special characters exactly the same on our computers, but a computer sold in a different country could have a slightly different taylored set of fonts and characters, so it won't show on their machine.

If you use the © (copyright) ® (which is an R with circle around it for "Registered") that should display as you intend. I don't believe there is a special character for TM in HTML, I think you have to use ® TM to get the R TM, but I could be wrong