Hey Fellas,

I am working on a web page(or pages,rather) for my
Home Theater setup. I have the main page laid out so
far and I would like for you all to take a look at it
and let me know what you think (be honest) none of the
other pages work yet. I think for the other pages I am
just going to have them pop up as a predetermined size
window that is scrollable and has a [close] button.

[Link: westol.com]

Nice start, Brett! I like dark and mysterious...

I agree with Mike...let us know when you update it!

Hey Guys,

Thanks for the kind words.. What I had posted was only
the vague beginings, if you go back and hit "refresh"
your browser will download the latest version and the
buttons now have a mouse over feature that I think
looks spectacular. Gotta love the lighting effects
feature in Adobe Photoshop. The RGB light is perfect
for the whole "Home Theater" look!

Right now everything should work with exception to the
images page and not all of the specs are posted on the
specs page (working on that)

again let me know what you think.

Looking very good, Brett. Keep at it; I like it. (... I get all goose pimply when randy agrees with me...) ... Mike

Hi Brett,
Very nice work in progress...I really like the concept of the page. I do have a couple of suggestions though.

Roll over images take too long to appear. I use a T1 (1.5Mbps dedicated) at work and a Cable Modem (regularly get 2-4Mbps) at home. I really like the rollover image though-pretty cool.

I like the curtain effect coming away from the screen, but I think that they look too wavy..maybe have a sweeping effect showing the tops further to the sides than the bottoms in a curved fashion. Making them look like they are being opened.

I would also drop the blue boxes around the links at the bottom, text extends beyond them a bit on some of the links.

Lastly the popups...great concept! Only suggestion here is that the text colors are confusing on the eyes..bright, dark and light. And the text seems very jumbled together. I would match the text in the list to the same font used in the Title on the pop up. It seems to be much smoother than the text used in the body of the page. Also, you may want to force the links to be a certain color, or have it change color on mouse over.

Great work so far!!...Tony

Tony,

Thanks for the suggestions. I intentionaly made the
text protrude on some of the buttons. The text is
Arial Black and I don't think that font is default
on everyone's system therfore I would have to have
them download the font to view the text correctly.

So I just went with regular arial as the text style
for the rest of the page. I agree the popup windows
do need some work. What I need to do is add a table
to constrain the text a bit.. I didn't know the text
colors were hard on the eyes.. I don't know what else
I could go with other than Grey and White ?

I am on a regular 56K at home and it loaded faster than
most comercial web sites. And once it's loaded then it
stays in cache and doesn't take long to reload at all.
Everything is in low bit rate gif format and I don't
know how I could whach any more size out of files
without ruining thier quality. The buttons are maybe
5-10K in size each.

Again thanks for the comments keep em comming! :)

As per Mike's request via email I have added more pix
of the system. He wanted to see behind the receiver so
I snapped a picture of that mess! And while I was at it
I took a plethora of various other images. Enjoy!

:)

Just wanted to see if I was the only one with a nightmare living behind my equipment...!

Actually, what I really want to see is extreme 3-D rotating close-ups of individual Devices.... ... Mike

.....Thus sayeth Mike the Challenger!

Hi Brett,

I think why it gets hard on the eyes are the links after the title of the line and then the explanation. Do you know how to write a script that will make the links a certain color? If not I may be able to help you out-of you want email me and I can see what I can do for ya!.
Also, I think a table is good idea. I see that you use Frontpage to code your pages, does it allow insertion of tables (I use dreamweaver)? If so that is the route to go IMO. It makes it much easier to read that way, not to mention easier to edit later on....Tony

Mike,

What you want, and what you get at 2 diffrent things..
Do you think I am going to sit there and photograph all
of my pieces from all angles? Aye! No way :)


Ttiger,

Actualy I use good old Notepad.EXE to do all my HTML
coding.. I have been working with HTML for some 10 or
so years.. (Well, it seems that long) to make a link
a specific color all you need to do is add a VLINK and
ALINK code tab and assigns the color. It's simple I to
do, I just haven't done it yet :) The reason you see
FrontPage as the generator is because I copied the head
ing from one of my buddies pages (to get the mouseover
java script) and I didn't bother to change the content
generator tag.

I appreciate the offer of help though!