GRC 175 Learning and Discussion Forum

I just uploaded an initial version of my design to the server. Please post comments and let me know what you think.

http://www.grc175.com/student/fall_2011/matthew_minten/

Looks good. The centered font is killing me though. Centered is the worst for legibility especially with how long your line length is. I would recommend changing the alignment and possibly adding a bit more of a margin between your paragraph and the containing element. It would shorten your line length a bit and help with legibility that much more. Also may want to think about different typeface for the paragraph font, just looks to untouched.

I agree completely. Actually in my Dreamweaver files I had set it with 20px of padding and justified. It looks like the server finally updated it because now it's showing up. Still think I shorten shorten the paragraph width?

My question is about font. When creating a website you currently only have a few fonts to choose from. You obviously don't want the text to be part of the image because then the search engines have nothing to read. Anyone have a way to use cool fonts yet still have readable text?

I dont know how savy you are with css but you can use the font-family style to make certain families of fonts to be rendered depending on what the viewer has installed on their computer. Or you can try using the @font-face style which will embed a licensed truetype or opentype font in your page and that will be displayed. From the reading I have done the @font-face is really browser sensitive so if you want to try that I would do a lot of testing. For the full syntax for the @font-face try this site. http://www.css3.info/preview/web-fonts-with-font-face/

Another fix you can do to get around the whole search engine thing would be to design your page how you want with whatever font you want in photoshop then just copy the text and put it in the html on top of the image, put a class on the paragraph or headline and just use css to hide it from the browser with...

display: none;

I have heard a lot of screen readers do not render text under the display: none; style but you can always just absolutely position it and put it like -999em or something off the screen if you are worried about blind people. So if you are worried about search engines finding your site that is a good way to put content into your page and still having a good looking page.

Looking good Matt. Nice use of textures and imagery. It's a very peaceful design. It invites me in. I can practically smell the alpine air and trees.

I just have a couple of critiques at this stage:

- The blue of the background is clashing with the blue in the sky. I'd make your background more of a sky blue.
- I'd also decrease the top margin a little, it's pushing the website down a little too much. Maybe try a percentage value.
- I think a serif type would work a little better for the bodycopy. Sans serif is a little cold and this is a warm, inviting design.
- I'd also shrink the drop show a little, it's too boad.