Alt-BEAM Archive
Message #12320
To: beam@sgiblab.sgi.com
From: Bruce Robinson Bruce_Robinson@telus.net
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2000 21:15:08 -0800
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: Suggestions Anyone?
Hi, Mike.
> So I know beambotix is kind of so-so...
I think you've fallen into the "What you see is not what I get" trap. I
don't know if this is built into FrontPage, but your page is so rigidly
formatted that individual browsers don't have any room to interpret --
and that's what HTML was designed to do.
For example, your page appears as a narrow band down the center of my
20", 1280 pixel wide screen, because the page is locked into a table 600
pixels wide. The text is much too small for my tired old eyes, even
though my browser is set up to make text a little larger (when it can).
My final suggestion for improving (I'll stop whining in a minute) is to
fine tune your colour scheme. The blue-gray background doesn't contrast
well enough with the darker blue border, OR with black text.
OK, now for the good stuff. Banners. If you gotta have them, you gotta
have them. I find the "static" ones such as yours are far less intrusive
than the dynamic, "in your face" adds.
News. Have you had a look at Chiu's page? Nothing's changed on it,
'cause he got a job and has negative free time, but when he was active,
it was a very dynamic page ... just took too long to load. While Chiu
was pretty active at surfing the web, he also made a point of following
up every lead that appeared on the BEAM list. I found a couple of home
pages where people said, in effect "This site is better than Chiu's --
all he does is post the same information that appears in the mailing
list. Big deal." The thing is, that was very handy. I would often blow
away a note, because I wasn't interested in the topic. Than a couple of
weeks later, I would suddenly realize I needed the link ... and there it
was on Chiu's site. He wouldn't copy the messages verbatim ... just
picked out the interesting bits, and the links that he thought might be
useful, and stuck them on the top of his page.
As you add stuff, you might also want to think about how it is
organized. For example, when I started building the BEAM Web Index, most
of the sites I found had one page dedicated to a robot, instead of
having a whole bunch of robots on one page. This was usually easier to
read, because the images AND the text were larger. It also turned out to
be the arrangement which worked best for the Index. In the circuits side
of things, I found that most people put up a whole bunch of circuits on
one page, with a brief bit of text; that doesn't fit the BEAM Web Index
at all, and is also a pain for people who are trying to describe a
circuit. It would be much more useful all around if there were one
circuit per page.
Of course, while this is the best arrangement for the Index, or for
people who want to troubleshoot, it means more work for the web site
designer :)
Anyway, a few random musings. Don't take any of it too seriously :)
Bruce
12321 Tue, 21 Mar 2000 21:58:51 -0800 [alt-beam] Curiosity killed the cat BEAM list Chris Weimann ok what/who is FRED?
-chris
Home