... which (used to be) attached to this board.

Back in 1998, when I bought the domain name badastronomy.com, I decided to redesign the site to celebrate. Plus, I had completely outgrown the old format. A friend of mine did the redesign, and she did great job (that whole story can be found here).

But I outgrew that design as well. I added a third column to accommodate sub-menus and of course the ads, and then I decided to add a section about media, and then and then and then.

Well, the site now looks, not to put too fine a point on it, ugly. It was great six years ago, but now I've really trashed it. It's time for a redesign. Also, I will probably soon bite the bullet and go to a dedicated server (Fraser from Universe Today, and a BABBer, recommended I do it, too, and he's pretty smart).

Why post about it? Well, my original friend who did the redesign is waaaaayyyy too busy now to do it. I have another friend (yes! really!) who might do the redesign, and she told me I should ask readers what they want.

So. What do you want?

Feel free to suggest. I am open to almost anything within reason. But some caveats--

1) I want to do everything using cascading style sheets. I use HTML tables now, and I hate them.

2) I would like to go to a width of 750 or so pixels.

3) The ads are staying. Sorry, folks, but at $100/month for hosting, that's a firm statement.

4) I'd like to integrate the blog and BABB better, but I'm not sure how this will work. It depends on the next version of phpBB, but it's something I'm keeping an eye on.

5) It must be expandable, in that I want to be able to add a new section or something eventually.

I make no promises that I will take any advice given here, but I do know that we have some clever people on this board, so I'm curious to know what you think. I make no offers of reward, either, except the glowy warm feeling knowing that in a very small way, you helped staunch the tide of pseudoscience by making my site prettier. :P

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Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomer
http://www.badastronomy.com
badastro@badastronomy.com

What's your bandwidth again, I've forgotten, something like 36 gb I think? Have you looked at places like Midphase or P4Host?

I don't know much about Midphase, I think I saw a recommendation on the php website... maybe it was MySQL's.

I had a site with P4host for a bit with my wife's business that fell through. Eventually my museum is probably going to shift the site I'm running from mooching off a member's space to our own and one of those two are in the lead. P4host has 40gb bandwith and 1gb space for $9/mo. (Plan details.)

Design-wise, I use Macromedia's Studio MX 2004 (Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks) with Adobe Photoshop as my main graphic tool. It's a good What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get. But the pricetag is kinda heafty, $900. However, their non-profit discount is 75%! So maybe you could cut a deal through Sonoma.

Here's our site, not the best in the world, but hey, I'm self taught and have a "real" job to pay the bills that eats up most of my time, and a baby that eats up the rest. The first page is mostly (our) ads to suck you in deeper and it's only 25% or so complete. We (well I) are (is) working on the movie, professional services, and group tour sections now. Then there's the railfan part to put up and a members section that'll host the BB and blow our bandwidth out of the water.

Wow, this looks like an ad...

What about a php based site? It would make it really easy to integrate the BB, and should be completely customizable and expandable.

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"The plan does not involve mayonaise."
"... I knew there was a catch."

You can't take the sky from me.

You may want to speak to LunarOrbit. He revived and redid Apollohoax before it went bust. Did an excellent job with it.

Now for some small suggestions:

A link back to the main site from the blog would be much appreciated.

Also, it may just be my settings, but it seems that the site is very narrow. You have a lot of wasted space on the right that could be put to good use.

Added:

Maybe move the site introduction to a more visible place rather than at the bottom.

And of course make the ads for your book and merchandise more visible. Heck, get more merchandise. From what I read about the service that you use, it costs you nothing to do it.

Perhaps you could remove some of the links and, er, stuff from the main page as well. It's getting kind of cluttered.

Your ads still seem to be acting up. The ones at the bottom of the forum are rarely visible to me. They don't pay if no one can see them.

And if you need help with anything specific, ask here. I'll help if I can, and I'm sure the rest of us BABBers will as well.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

Please, whatever you do, don't load your main site with flash. I hate having all that crap load up when all I want is to have access to the info.

Change is good, but all fluff and no substance isn't.

KISS theory applies. Your current site might be seeing it's age, but it's still very functional.

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"The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest." - G'Kar

True. You'll want to keep the people with dial-up modems in mind.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

I think a phpnuke (I think that's what it's called) would be good, It makes it much easer to add content etc... Although setting it up is harder.

If you decide to stick with html, you can get a good template and then you don't need any tables.

I reaken it's a great idea to redesighn the site, sometimews I discover pager's I never knew about before.

You can at least be sure that even in its current state it is way better than the psudosciesests site's.

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If this writing is blue you're going too fast!

Got another one. You could add an explanation of the Google ads somewhere on the main site. Someone may see an ad for, say, something supporting Hoagland, and they may get the wrong idea.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

When I used to dabble in the dark art of web design, I lived for tables. It's amazing what you can do(and totally mess up) with a ton of embedded tables.

But CSS is the way to go. You have so much more conrtrol, and is a boatload easier to maintain.


Or, you could be real brave and try and redo your site with good old frames. :P

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"The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest." - G'Kar

You know, try having a contest on this site and let your members throw out some designs. I think quite a few people here would be up to the challenge.

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"The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest." - G'Kar

Creating pages in php is great... you can really make life easier for yourself by breaking common elements (headers, footers, sidebars, etc.) into separate files and then telling the server to add them to each individual page automatically. That way if you want to add a link to your sidebar you only have to edit one file instead of one hundred. To do this 99% of the code is still ordinary HTML, only a small amount of PHP would be used.

CSS also makes things a lot easier because it helps you create a uniform style for all pages... again without having to edit every page when you make a change.

Designing a three column page without using tables can be challenging unless you fix the width of the page to a certain size. If you want the page to automatically stretch to fit the width of the visitors screen no matter what resolution it is set at then tables are the way to go.

You should be able to integrate the blog with the main site without too much trouble. I've played with Wordpress and the template system is pretty easy to work with.

Also, if you want all of the features of phpbb ver. 3.0 today then consider switching to SMF. I just switched my forum to SMF this week and I love it so far. Upgrading SMF is easier than upgrading phpbb, it's more secure, and it has more features. The only problem is that if you're almost out of webspace right now you probably won't be able to transfer the database.

As far as colour schemes etc. are concerned, I think the grey/white look your site has now is fine and I wouldn't change much. It's easy on the eyes.

Don't use frames. Trust me :wink:

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If this writing is blue you're going too fast!

I think I'll back Mickal on that...

I'll ditto the no frames.

phpWebSite's good also, that's what we used originally before getting Studio MX. There were some buggy items with phpWS though, can't quite remember what... The only bad issue I had with it, and phpNuke, was once I started geting the hang of site deisgn, I started feeling hemmed in. phpWS runs off of what had to have been hundreds of php files and trying to dig through them to find the one file that controlled a particular setting get annoying quick. I ended up going to bed completely POed many times after spending an entire evening unsucessfully trying to change some simple item.

As for tables, Dreamweaver makes them almost as easy to manipulate as an Excel spreadsheet. Especially if you have to span a lot of columns or rows.

Believe it or not, the majority of web users are still using 800x600 resolution! (2/3 to 3/4 of them) So the 750 pixels that he stated (item #2) is, unfortunately, advisable. I tried making ours where the text area floated so that it always filled up the screen, but it became a design nightmare as I never knew where graphics would end up. So I too desgned for a fixed 750 px width (50 px to account for a scrollbar and whatnot). And thanks again to LunarOrbit for showing me a neat trick to make the background somewhat interesting. (Credit where credit is due.)

Yes, I think a design contest would be an excellent idea. I'd actually sent an email offering to rework the site probono many moons ago, but I figured it got lost in the mass of email and spam the BA gets.

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Photons have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic.

An application I would recomend that I've used for a couple different Web sites is Mambo Server. Found at:

http://www.mamboserver.com

It's quite the content manager allowing you complete control over css, creating new forms, new pages, sub pages and imbedding design around 3rd party programs. It also has built in spell check for article submission, RSS news feeds and various other news feeds. All kinds of fun stuff.

If you like, I can set up a sample site for review with a number of installed templates. The nice thing is that I have experience working with the templates and can custom design them.

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Photons have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic.

CSS is definitely the way to go. I agree with the others who say stay away from frames and don't get into fancy, bandwidth- (and time-) consuming stuff like Flash.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

They are not as evil as they once were, especially with iframes, and can be used to save on downloads and page weight.
I'd take issue with that statistic. We did an actual log of settings of visitors to our site, and it came down on 80% plus at 1024 x 768. PHPBB uses tables and page widths to good effect. It doesn't have to be fixed at 750.

If you are already using PHPBB- there are other PHP pages/updates/other things that one can do to make it more than a bulletin board, some just with a 40 minute code fix, and if you'd like your Blog in the same system, you can do that too...

I've only dabbled, and I'm sure there are others around here, but setting this up took only two hours or so:
Design I fiddled with for my family's personal website.

The advantages are that many of the add-ons (Portal configuration, for instance) come with manager components that add on to the normal management panel, and make making changes that much easier.

You're welcome, Captain Kidd. Unlike magicians web designers like to share their secrets. Your site looks great, btw.

CSS let's you do some cool things. A good site for learning CSS (and HTML etc.) is W3Schools. It's the first place I go when I'm stuck with a design problem.

Here is my personal page:

http://www.kellyjones.ca

It demonstrates several things: (1) using php to insert the header and left & right columns; (2) using tables for the 3 columns; (3) a CSS controled colour scheme and layout; (4) intergrating a Wordpress blog; and (5) just how boring my life is.

Yep- slap the link to the BB on that and you're done.

I guess a lot depend on the expectant audience. The more tech-savvy people are going to likely have a likewise resolution increase. But, IIRC, Windows still defaults to 800 x 600 and there's quite a few people out there that probably don't know how (or why) to change it.

It is likely age correlated too. They younger people are going to more into the more advanced stuff. I hate to admit it, but I’m not completely up on what RSS is and its applicability… ah-hemm. 8-[ But then, my site doesn’t need live feeds either.

We target families and the "I use to ride trains to/from X city and would love to ride again for nostalgia” people; i.e. older people and people with kids that don’t have the time/money/inclination to learn the new stuff. Rule #1 for railroading: When in doubt, the safe course of action shall be taken. (Not that anybody's like to get killed because of a monitor resolution setting mishap.) However, it’s a safe bet that my site probably has a far higher average visitor’s age than, say, Fark or Slashdot and a corresponding higher percentage of low browser setting too.

Once I get some more things together, I’m going to make a general survey and get a true feel for what our visitors are like. Once I figure out the whole poll coding business, right now I’m learning how to do feedback forms.

Here’s a Google Answers page on the resolution issue.

Now as for here... I couldn't even begin to guess what Phil's median visitor age is. I will bet that the BABB age is younger than the website proper's visitor age.

Ah, well - design and interface for Air Force medical branch systems here- to include making a browser interface act like an application (drag and drop, click-edit of page code, dynamic resize, etc...) We had a long argument about 800 x 600 standards to the point that my boss went and pulled the logs from the last six months of hits to our sites (there are multiple)- came up about 80+% 1024 x 768, partly because newer computers are being set for a slightly higher resolution by the AF service centers... and partly because we have a chunk of users stuck with AF hand-me-downs at lower res.

My dad had a situation where some older clients couldn't see the entire statistical site (it was a commercial graphing program with a minimum resolution) without scrolling, so they asked for bigger monitors (21"). Came back with the same problem later - with their settings still at 640 x 480. #-o

I think any new computer shipped since Windows XP was released defaulted to 1024x768 resolution.

Here are some statistics from W3Schools.

Only 38% of people set their resolution to 1024x768 in 2002, but now it is up to 53%. Only 29% still use 800x600. But keep in mind that those stats are for the W3Schools website which means it is mostly web designers visiting. So the stats might be a little biased.

PHP is defenetly a good way to go!
you can update your site from remote locations, its fast, you can use templated and get the data out of a database...

only down side it you need a good database host.

I would also like to see the board more tiedin with the layout of the main site so there more ore less one.

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GCS/S d(+) s+:+ a--- C++(+++)>$ W+++>$ L>+ M+>++ w++ P+>++ tv@ PS b+ DI+ G e-> h! r-- !z+

~Jorge Schrauwen

If the BA or anyone else might be interested. I put up a sample of the MamboServer content manager. Admin is not available until I get a chance to update the user login/password information to the MySQL database. Didn't realize you had access to view that info from the Admin area.

Hey this template even has a nice solar flare!

http://www.handyblues.org/badastronomy/index.php

It's PHP based tied into a MySQL server. Most of the site can be administered indirectly using templates and directly by module and page content administration. If you are of programing bent, you have access to template html and template css. There are dozens and dozens of available tempaltes, all kinds of fun plugins (including phpbb), blog, newsfeeds, calendars, and more and more.

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Photons have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic.

Huh, people use 1024 x 768? I use 1152 x 864. Odd, I know, but it seems to work.

Also, LunarOrbit's site works fine with any resolution that I care to choose. I went down to the lowest setting (800 x 600) and I didn't need to scroll to see the whole thing. If the BA could pull that off, the site would look very good.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

Anything higher than 1024x768 is too hard on my eyes, but I guess it depends on the quality of the monitor too.

Yeah, I've got a 23 inch. Any smaller resolution is way too big.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

I got 1 19" TFT the res is 1280x1024 and it the same as 1024x768 on a 15" (my 2nd monitor) the 19" just has more space thats all

(soon i'll have 2x1"' )

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GCS/S d(+) s+:+ a--- C++(+++)>$ W+++>$ L>+ M+>++ w++ P+>++ tv@ PS b+ DI+ G e-> h! r-- !z+

~Jorge Schrauwen