Stylesheets

The only thing evil about style sheets is that they aren’t immediately visible: one must be able to see how web pages are made in order to steal ideas, which is how we all learn the business.  Here are my style sheets laid out in as they exist in my site hierarchy.  In a good browser you can click on the links to see the stylesheets, in less good ones “Save Link As” a cascading style sheet (css) file.  Like any good addition to HTML, style sheets can be viewed edited in notepad or simpletext.

• melancon.css
• links.css
• publish.css
• catsup.css
• bemweb
• journ_web_design.css
• benjamin.css
• about.css

Philosophy

“May HTML always rule the internet.  Tables are all that are needed to keep a web designer happy.”  That’s what I wrote in 2000, and I am already recanting.

I tried to keep Jakob Nielsen’s book Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity in mind while making this site.  He is also a great source of moral support for us table-and-text people.

Photojournalism professer and site design guru Rick Newton forced me to include some fireworks graphics, rollovers, etc.  If you do not die of boredom at this site, thank him.

At all times the lack of taste is mine and mine alone.

Second Thoughts

As my Journalism 397W: Web Design site shows I am happy to include every link logically connected to the current page.

But then I decided not to use this structure even on the links page.  So right now the only navigation is up to the parent levels or down to the child levels.  Within-level navigation is not supported.  Should I at least have all the top-level (links, CATSUP, Publishing, etc.) links on a bar across the bottom of each page?  Or should I keep take the discreet-company idea further and move the Melançon Enterprises link to the left, leaving the rest of the page open to varied types of navigation?

I think the best thing to do is add a layer behavior to the cookie-crumbs list at the top and give the child pages of each on mouseover.  For example, you would get About’s sibling pages: the Links home page, the CATSUP home page, etc. by putting the mouse over Melançon Enterprises. (Layer would have a “roll over to close menu” graphic [with picture of closed menu].)  Implemented on this page!

About the sub-sites

See the picture from which I made the Library’s columns.

e-mail me and critique my web site, please: melancon@student.umass.edu

or, if you don’t feel like reasoned criticism, use this silly evaluation form.