Quote:
Originally Posted by DMS Racing
Some love it (some hate it) you can NEVER please everyone  |
Who loves frames?!?!!?!
Web designers hate frames, people hate frames ( you can't link people to pages) and for that same reason Google and search engines hate frames. And it is actually easier to use SSI like the rest of the world has since the late 90's. And you can see how it messes up the site layout, when you scroll down the whole gradient is ruined and looks a little nasty.
If it's not too presumptuous I would like to make a few suggestions that will really improve the site (in terms of load and SEO). Firstly switching to SSI (you can do it in HTML, PHP or whatever you want). It is dead simple, and makes the page look and work like frames, but it is the server that processes it and puts it together rather than the client computer. This saves a lot of code lines (each frame in HTML has to have html, head and body tags, whereas SSI makes it just one page) so this saves the number of lines and makes the site quicker! And obviously this makes pages "linkable" and means search engines can actually crawl the website. Whereas previously people could only link to, or see, a page like
http://www.xfactoryrc.co.uk/xfact/specials.asp this.
Secondly, the background image is massive!!! 30kb or so, and it's not the file size but the physical size (1280x1024) that is the issue and also how you have coded it and how it is done. Firstly, you haven't made the background vertical. If you use photoshop, it is best to make a vertical guide first to ensure you make the gradient vertical. This gives a stiching error like this:
(image above - may be slow to load)
And secondly it's not repeated correctly, so it actually repeats the whole image again which makes it look rather bizarre when you scroll down on big pages. Like this:
(image above)
I can see you have made the background fade back to black again but I don't think it looks too good personally. Although obviously if it is your intended look ignore this last comment.
So what I suggest, you can make the image much smaller. This will do the job, if you want to make it much smaller and mesh better and keep the current recurring gradient on scroll you could replace the whole massive image with this much smaller one:
http://img142.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bgiz8.gif
http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/1497/bgiz8.gif
Only 4kb.
If you want the gradient just fading to white and staying there, you can get away with a much smaller image:
http://img227.imageshack.us/img227/5370/bg2wy6.gif
And then in the body part of the css you could replace your current:
BODY
{
BACKGROUND-COLOR: #3399FF;
BACKGROUND-IMAGE: url(../images/background.jpg);
With something like:
BODY
{ background-color: #dfe1f8;
background-image: url(../bg2.gif);
background-repeat: repeat-x;
Oh yes, before I forget, it might just be because of the my contrast monitor but the factory logo does not blend perfectly into the header. This is just an error with the background on xfactory_header.jpg and is to change on photoshop or whatever you use. I have changed the contrast on photoshop to make this stand out more to explain my issue:
(image above)
Obviously you might be working on these things already, but thought I would suggest it anyway rather than just be negative. But honestly there is a reason frames died along with dial up.