Redesigned website, please help with comments

[OldColonel]

I would like to have people look at our redesigned web site. We are almost ready to have the domain point to the new host. Comments solicited. I have answered, to the best of my ability, David Gillaspey’s questions – they are below.

1. Current Status – We have gone through a web site redesign and are almost ready to change to the new hosting service. The current URL is http://208.109.13.68/ (http://208.109.13.68/) . I have a small advisory group to help in suggestions and critique but all the implementation is my responsibility. I am self taught and learned from working with the old website http://www.stpaulucc.org (http://www.stpaulucc.org/) . This site was a clutter that still displayed the stamp of the starting program, “FrontPage”. It did not have a consistent navigation system and had a host of other problems and was crying out for redesign. I purchased a life membership in Great Church Web Sites before starting the redesign process and invited the team to study examples on your site.
2. Design Tips – I have studied the design tips and I believe that we have conformed to many of them and violated some. As an example the word “Ministries” is in the list of links and I have to review all the pages and use “Title Tags”, I haven’t done this yet. Several of the Photo Albums are far too large and take too long to load, they will be redesigned. Many of the features require broadband; this was a conscious decision by the team. Not all links are listed on the Home Page; it was our hope that we would cater to seekers on this page. “Inside St. Paul” is the entrance to the main portion of the site, though any link will take you to a page with the full set of links. Major navigation is on the left and minor navigation, if needed, is on the right.
3. General Proficiency
HTML – I do not program html but I can modify source code that has been written. It is similar enough to other programming languages that I am familiar with.
CSS – I am a rank novice with virtually no understanding how to generate CSS script.
Web standards – No knowledge, I depend on Dreamweaver to help me.
I am 78 years old and I generally only use the design portion of Dreamweaver. I will never design web sites professionally so I only learn as much as is necessary for my purposes. (A sad commentary that a person my age is the only person in a medium sized church that is willing to implement a web site.)
4. Software tools – I have the Adobe Web Standard CS3 suite; Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash Professional, Contribute plus some others in this suite. I also have Adobe Photoshop and use IrfanView. I also use Roxio v7 and v9 and Nero Burning for video manipulation.

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Bill,

Well first, the redesigned site is much better than the old (or current) one. So congratulations for achieving that.

In a future post, I will discuss a further redesign, to implement down the road. But in this post, I'll focus on your current redesign.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/sp_ucc.jpg

(Above) Home page of the redesign.

My comments/critiques:

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/sp_ucc2.jpg

1. (Above) The navigational links are graphical — text turned into graphics. Current standards incline toward just using text for navigation, instead of graphics.

At least you had the good sense (helped by a feature in Dreamweaver) to add "Alt" text attributes for these graphical links (in the source HTML code), for the sake of blind people who browse the web using a screen reader. However, that same Dreamweaver accessibility feature resulted in there being inserted numerous instances of "undefined" TITLE attributes and ID attributes in the source HTML code (for the home page, anyway). You should fix those or remove them, since they otherwise bloat your code.

2. I would suggest switching to a sans serif font — Verdana. The typeface you are using for the navigation links has what are known as thin strokes and thick strokes. (This is characteristic of typefaces designed in a certain era long ago.) The thin strokes are in danger of being lost when viewed on a computer monitor.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/sp_ucc3.jpg

3. (Above) Where's the player controls for this video?

While I highly applaud your taking (or someone taking) the initiative to produce and post a welcome video from the senior pastor, there are two things that could improve this:

a) Let the player controls show all the time. At present, the player controls appear on mouseover. That's just plain non conventional. Users expect to see and be able to use player controls at all times.

b) Think about the background of the video — all those scholarly books! That sends a unspoken message to the viewer. If you're truly focused on reaching non Christians, I think you'll want to redo the video and have the senior pastor outside (on a cloudy day — video doesn't handle bright sun + shadows very well) or inside against a plainer or more friendly background.

By the way, for technical reasons, you'll get smaller file sizes = faster downloads of video if the background is plain. Of course, plain backgrounds are boring, so you want to achieve a balance between plain and busy backgrounds. But the plethora of books in the background of this video is probably not the best background choice for a video that will be compressed for the web.

4) The home page is narrower by 10 to 20 pixels than some or all of the inside pages. The jump from one width to another is disconcerting to the user.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/sp_ucc4.jpg

5. (Above) On inside pages, the navigation gets split between left and right columns. I think that probably should be avoided. Keep the navigation on one side. Of particular concern is the fact that the links on the righthand side aren't underlined. It's common for links in the lefthand column to not be underlined, because they're understood to be links. But users won't expect a left and a right navigation column. Thus, the information in the box on the right does not appear to the user to be links. (In fact, on one page, the text in the box on the righthand side really doesn't contain any links.)

To be blunt, it's difficult to navigate through your site at present, because of the left and righthand navigation, the lack of underlining of links in the righthand column, etc. In fact ....

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/sp_ucc7.jpg

(Above) ... here's a page where the user is presented with navigation on the left, in the center, and on the right. (The orange rectangle appeared on mouseover.)

Again, I'm sorry to be blunt, but this is bound to confuse the user. You'll want to work on the navigation scheme for your site, for the next iteration.

6. (Above) The centered type under the photos on the inside pages is not the best option. It would be better to use flush left/ragged right text. The problem with centered text is that it is harder for the eye to find the start of the next line, compared to flush left text where all the lines start at an invisible line.

Also, you'll want to add more leading, or white space, between lines of text that are this wide. However, that requires using CSS.

Also, I spot checked the source code of one inside page. It didn't appear you had supplied ALT text attributes (in the source HTML code) for the images on that page. This is something you'll want to do on every page.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/sp_ucc5.jpg

7. (Above) The "More Information" is unreadable due to the shadow, as can be seen in the screenshot. Moreover, I would suggest just not using the "script" (handwriting like) font. It doesn't fit with the rest of the site. However, the main problem is that shadow. Make it subtle.

8. (Above) Elements in most graphic design compositions, including web pages, need to be separated by a consistently wide ribbon of white space called a gutter. (I represent gutters by the parallel red lines in the screen shot above.) By "consistently wide," I mean the space is the same between all major elements in the composition.

9. (Above) While I applaud your using photos on the inside pages, as shown above, I would suggest over time providing more text information on inside page, especially text that includes specific details. The text I'm reading now on inside pages is very general.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/sp_ucc6.jpg

10. (Above) Sorry, but the photos at the top of this page, which I'm sure you or someone took much time and effort to acquire, just make the site look unprofessional.

11. (Above) The map ("Location map for St. Paul" tab — actual map not shown) should not be combined with the Contact us page. Location and contact information are different kinds of information. Give the map its own link in the navigation.

12. On the plus side, you've made it possible for visitors to your site to email you, the "Web Minister," about problems, or whatever. That's good. My preference is to see an email link to you (as the web minister) at the bottom of the home page, however.

If you're worried about spam, realize that such an email link has a specific purpose, and the email address can be changed regularly.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/sp_ucc8.jpg

13. (Above) Using a "jump menu" to list downloadable sermons is ... a novel idea. I have not seen this done before. It will be interesting to see what others on the forum think about it. It will certainly do for now, but I would encourage you to move toward straightforward lists (that is, list of links to sermons).


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/sp_ucc9.jpg

14. (Above) Where will the viewer start to read? At the start of the text, under the photo? or at the top of the second column, where the pastor's gaze points?

In layouts like these (another pastor's bio is just below this one, laid out in the same manner), you want to put the photo at the top of the second column, and let the text "wrap" underneath the photo. That is, the second column of text is short, fitting in the space under the photo.

Well, it's 1 a.m., and I have to stop and go to bed.

I hope these comments are helpful to you. As stated above, your redesigned site is much better than the old one, so go ahead and launch the redesign, but I've given you some pointers to improve the site down the road.

[OldColonel]

David,
I am deeply appreciative for the time you have taken to do an in depth critique of the redesigned site. I sent a link to your comments to the staff and my committee and the majority of them have responded. In turn I sent my response to them and I am including it here for everyones information.
Thanks to all who responded to David Gillaspey’s critique. I’ll weigh in with my response to his points.

Text Link Navigation. In my mind this is the most important of his suggestions and it goes along hand in hand with his comments about site navigation. I spent the majority of yesterday on the internet researching this topic. Everyone on the Internet agrees that there is a good reason for text link navigation and the way to do it seems to be with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). With CSS changes in the navigation scheme can be changed/updated in seconds rather than in hours. It also can be seen by those who have Java turned off in their browsers. (I briefly considered using Java for text links.) I am currently studying to make myself familiar with CSS. I believe that we should make this change, whether I can do it before we go live remains to be seen.
Using the Verdana font. This comes as a freebe with 1 above. I think David was referring to the font on the graphic links but since I plan to go to text links as soon as possible I am not going to redesign this portion.
Retaking Drew’s video has always been in the works. The fly in the ointment is including visible controls rather than mouse-over controls. If we do this we may not have room for more than one welcome video and Kristy’s video may have to be left out. So I think that it is a tradeoff that the committee and staff will have to make a decision on.
Width of home page vs. inside pages. The home page is not from a template while all of the inside pages are. It is interesting that the home page is actually 4 pixels wider than the inside pages (786 pixels vs. 782 pixels). I think that the lack of a border on the home page gives the illusion that it is narrower. I view this as a very low priority change.
Navigation Scheme – I commented on this in 1 above. The use of CSS will make the text links appear to be roll over buttons. However I have strong feelings that the AJAX tabs should be retained on the few pages that use them. We will remove navigation from the right column and reserve that column for comments and amplifying remarks. We may make this a two step transition as Jae suggests but if we can make the change all at once it may actually consume less time.
Centered text – Changing the centered text to left justified is easy and will be done.
The More Info graphic on the seeker pages. I agree with this. I’ll replace them with text links which actually give a description of what “More Info” is.
Gutter – Needs to be done.
More textual information on inside pages – Seeker pages are fine, we want them to be general but over time we can gradually add more information to the other pages. The redesign has been a gigantic task and in some areas we have simply gotten by with the minimum amount of stuff.
The Pigeon and Donkey on the email page – This was our attempt at humor. The comments from committee come down on the side of retaining them.
Location map to separate link – Good idea, it will be done.
Webminister email link – Over the years I’ve gotten maybe 2 or 3 emails about the site. I’m not overly concerned with having my address elsewhere. Committee agrees with this.
Sermon Jump Menus – The first iteration had the sermons in a list. Since we keep at least one year’s video sermons on the web site the list was long and confusing. I believe the jump menus allow a neat separation of the sermons into categories and allow them to be placed compactly on one page.
Staff Bios – The one area where I seem to be out of step with everyone. I designed the bios with text as one would in a newspaper or magazine article. Only Hebrew or Arabic text reads from right to left. (In this case its columns rather than complete text, you see what I mean.) Strangely everyone seemed to agree with David on this one. Since I have put two bios on each page (except for the last page) I will make use of the two columns and put the pictures at the top of the columns and the bio text under the pictures. If anyone disagrees with this approach let me know post haste. This will also allow me to get rid of the anchors.While I have noted that some of the changes are easy there are still a bunch of them and a huge number of pages in the site – so all of this won’t happen tomorrow. We may even go live without some of them being done. Also easy doesn’t translate to short time.
Bill

[camainc]

The previous review was very thorough, so I'll limit my comments to first impressions.

When I went to your new site, I was immediately greeted with a pop-up message telling me my flash player was out of date and that I needed an updated version to view the content of the page.

I'm not quite ready to upgrade, and I don't like being forced by someone else's website to do so. I clicked the "cancel" button, but was still able to view the pastor's video and the rotating images, so I'm not sure what the upgrade requirement was for.

My first impression of the site, because if the flash pop-up, started on a negative note.

After that, my impression was that the site is outdated, which is unfortunate because this is a brand-new redesign. The design reminds me of church sites from several years ago, before the CSS revolution. I would highly recommend viewing sites at the several CSS site galleries available for some fresh ideas:

http://www.cssremix.com/
http://www.styleshout.com/
http://www.oswd.org/
http://www.designshack.co.uk/
http://www.cssheaven.com/

Many of the developers who submit templates to these sites offer free CSS templates that provide a great starting point.

Blessings to you,

Charles Cherry
Myanmar Hope Christian Mission, Inc.
http://www.myanmarhope.org/

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Bill,

I finally found time to respond to your responses.

Everyone on the Internet agrees that there is a good reason for text link navigation and the way to do it seems to be with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Text links and CSS are separate issues. In a lefthand column, such as on your site, text links would be just lines or single-line paragraphs of text, one on top of another. You can style them with CSS, if you wish.

Things are more complicated if you have a navigation bar under a banner. As you know, this is common on websites. Traditionally, this was done as cells in a table row — each link in its own cell. With CSS, it's typically done as an HTML list. Through CSS (and only through CSS), the usually vertically arranged HTML list is made to appear as a horizontal row. It degrades nicely into a vertical list on cell phones, etc. (Well, I don't call that degrading nicely, but others do.)

Tables had one advantage: the cells would expand as necessary in the horizontal row to make each cell an equal width. I asked on a separate thread a long time ago how to do this with CSS; nobody provided an answer that works. But, there must be some way.

(If the available horizontal space is not evenly divided between all the items in the CSS-style list, then you end up with extra space on the left or right.)

Using the Verdana font. ... I think David was referring to the font on the graphic links but since I plan to go to text links as soon as possible I am not going to redesign this portion.Well, I don't even understand my own comment, but what I meant was use Verdana, a sans serif font, for everything.

Retaking Drew’s video has always been in the works. If we do this we may not have room for more than one welcome video and Kristy’s video may have to be left out. I don’t see a video of Kristy, so I'm confused.

More textual information on inside pages ... The redesign has been a gigantic task and in some areas we have simply gotten by with the minimum amount of stuff.That's understandable.

The Pigeon and Donkey on the email page – This was our attempt at humor.I meant that all the pictures are unnecessary.

Sermon Jump Menus – The first iteration had the sermons in a list. Since we keep at least one year’s video sermons on the web site the list was long and confusing. I believe the jump menus allow a neat separation of the sermons into categories and allow them to be placed compactly on one page.Jump menus are OK for now, but I encourage you to plan for columnar lists in the future. Here's why:

I believe the jump menus allow a neat separation of the sermons into categories and allow them to be placed compactly on one page.What categories? You've arranged them by speaker.

The problem with that is you force the user to search for sermons by speaker. What if the user wants to search some other way? Also, the oldest ones are on the bottom of each jump menu. People want the latest ones on top, not the bottom.

Really good sermon audio pages on church websites would be exemplified by these features:

Sermons arranged in a columnar list (to begin with) with various columns of information.

Columns of info might include: date, name of speaker, subject or series, length (rarely), and icons or text for sermon notes (Word or pdf), audio (if available), and video (if available). Typically, churches use icons to indicate notes, audio, and video, thus saving space. The date could actually be anywhere — left, right, or in between other columns.

By using similar but different icons, you could communicate that one file is for dial up, another for broadband. You take up maybe a quarter inch of space horizontally for each icon. I submit that's far more efficient than duplicating an entire list of sermons, one list for dial up, one for broadband. Basically, you're communicating through a jump menu four inches wide nothing more than "these are for dialup" or "these are for broadband" when icons in a column can do the same thing in one half inch.

Such a columnar list would be arranged in reverse chronological order by default, but could be optionally user-sorted by subject or series, or by speaker.

Columnar lists of data are easy to read. The lines in the jump menus jam a bunch of information together making each line of information hard to read.

With lists, you will certainly want to move sermons older than a certain amount of time to an archive page. But then, you'd need to do that for jump menus, too.

Lists could be stored in a backend mySQL database, making update more easy to accomplish.

There's also the question of SEO (search engine optimization). Do search engines read the text between <option> and </option> in source code? Anyone know? (I don't, myself, though for sure the ALT text and TITLE tags are read by search engines.) But, you can be sure that sermons displayed as columnar lists will be indexed by search engines.

Also: How will your visitors know they've heard a sermon already? With columnar lists of links to sermons, the link turns color to indicate the link was visited. That doesn't happen with jump menus.

Finally, I note that sermons in sermon series, such as the Traveling With Jesus (parts 1 through 7) series, do not appear together in any single jump menu, as they most certainly ought to. This is because different sermons in the series were given by different pastors. Wouldn't you consider that problematic for users?

Staff Bios. ... I will make use of the two columns and put the pictures at the top of the columns and the bio text under the pictures. That makes the pastors equal in importance, which probably is a good thing to do.

[JackWolfgang]

Google has a page of ours that uses an select-option construct cached, and the select-option displays all the options, so I would assume that the bots do index the option tag contents.

[OldColonel]

David,
Thank you for your critique and your comments. Your website has been great help to us all during our redesign process; your site is truly an important Christian ministry.
During this lengthy process we have gone through much iteration to arrive at this point and when the committee was satisfied we asked congregations members for their comments. Many changes were made from their suggestions.
Finally we asked you for your review. You have gone where others didn’t. I have implemented many of your suggestions and the site is better for them. I deeply appreciate the time you have taken to advise us.
We plan to go live with the site sometime after Oct. 22nd.
Still to be done – you have convinced me – I’m going to change the sermons to a list but right now I’m going to take a bit of rest before I reach serious burnout. I have invested at least 250 volunteer hours, perhaps more, since July in the redesign process.
In the future I would also like to change to textual navigation designed so that they look like roll-over buttons; I like them and I’m glad you led me to investigate this. I have found this rather easy to do with a brand new page (see for example http://208.109.13.68/NTP.asp (http://208.109.13.68/NTP.asp) ) but not so easy to convert the existing pages. Perhaps it’s because I’m only a few days into learning to deal with CSS. There may be ways to do this without going to a total redesign which I not willing to do right now.
I’m sorry to confuse you on the Drew, Kristy welcome videos. The one that you saw by Drew (Senior Pastor) was a first cut and we always planned to replace it. Drew’s final version is up now and a placeholder has been put in for Kristy’s video. The video will be in place in a few days.
Again, thank you for your site and your comments.
Bill

Charles Cherry,
I’m sorry you received such a negative impression from our new site. The prompt you received for update was automatically placed into the code by Dreamweaver and since my player was up to date I never saw it. A committee member did say she had received a prompt to update and found it easy to do. I would personally have been grateful to have received such a prompt, but everyone reacts differently.
As for the site appearance; if it appears to be dated, so be it. This is what the committee, staff and congregation wanted and it is what they got and everyone in the congregation who has reviewed the site is very happy with it. Even if the design had been done with total CSS support the appearance would still have been the same. I know you were trying to be helpful but CSS doesn’t affect appearance, the designer does. In our case the only appearance change that CSS would have made possible would have been that due to textual navigation.
Bill

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Bill,

This is process. You've a ways to go, but you've made good progress. Get some rest, then.

(Charles, the redesigned site that Bill's church will launch [go live with] soon is actually much improved over the current site. That's why I am able to say to Bill, "You've made good progress.")

[OldColonel]

Greetings David,
You might take a peek at the new St. Paul site, http://www.stpaulucc.org/ (http://www.stpaulucc.org/)
Since you made your comment about 2 weeks ago I have made some significant changes in the site, but not in the site appearance, I’m happy with that as is the congregation. It is now live and online.
The site is now designed around CSS and a new template. I decided to use a new template rather than cascading an external style sheet into the old template. This was because of some problems with the old template that I observed in Safari and Opera and possibly IEv6. The new template, driven by its external CSS companion, uses textual navigation exclusively. I’ve also put the sermons in a list; a change that is unrelated to CSS.
The star in this is the w3schools, a site that I stumbled across and as far as I’m concerned is one of the best kept secrets on the Internet. I was able to learn enough CSS at this site to design my own CSS external sheet in the matter of one or two days. I’m far from expert but what I’ve done so far works.
The site appearance is substantially the same in IEv7, FireFox, Netscape, Safari and Opera. It also works in IEv6 but the seeming bugs in this browser create some problems of formatting and causes a person to resort to ugly looking code in order to avoid some of the problems (the blank space bug).
I would like to again thank you for the time you took to critique the site. You pointed me in some directions that I know has resulted in a much better site. I wish you continued success in your ministry.
Bill

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Bill,

Glad to see you're making progress on the site. I'll browse the site more later this week.

<< I would like to again thank you for the time you took to critique the site. >>

You're welcome!

[OldColonel]

I've redesigned the St. Paul UCC, Belleville, IL site again. The URL is http://stpaulucc.org/ . This is a Content Managed site and we are striving to bring in various persons in the congregation to maintain pages. Right now the response of the site is sluggish especially during peak daytime hours. I blame this on the group hosting the web site. We are in process of selecting a new hosting agency and hope that the response of the site will be better after we change. David - take a look at this site. I think it is a great improvement over the site that I launched at the end of October last year.
Bill Whicher

[David Gillaspey]

David - take a look at this site. Hi Bill,

I will, in the next few days. I'm pushing hard at the moment to turn in a final project for my online web design class through The Art Institute Online.

The subject of my final project is the School for Church Webmasters site (http://www.school-for-church-webmasters.org), which I am preparing to transition from just a graphical flowchart showing the 65+ courses in the school to an actual website with text about the courses and certificate programs — text that can be read. (No actual courses yet, since those require many $$$ to develop.)

Forum members will receive an email notification when the revised site is ready.

[siamnaulak]

Hi Bill,

It is much better then the previous site. Well done.

On the top right side there is Log in menu for the registered member, but I didn’t see any new register option/link if a new person wants to register. Is it made to be like that or missed out?

Thanks

[OldColonel]

Siam

On the top right side there is Log in menu for the registered member, but I didn’t see any new register option/link if a new person wants to register. Is it made to be like that or missed out?

The Log In that you refer to on the St. Paul site is for church members who have a responsibility to maintain pages. They log on and then are able to modify pages using a built in word processor. It is possible to have registered members and pages that are only available to be viewed by registered members but that is not the intent on the St. Paul site.
Thank you for your comments.
Bill Whicher

[flutem3]

Hi, Bill,

I didn't look at the other one, but this looks nice...on Internet Explorer. But on Firefox the page is kind of "split" into two distinct sections with lots of horizontal scrolling.

My IE is set at 800x600 and so is my Firefox. I will check it on something else. Wait just a minute. There is great horizontal scrolling required on Safari as well. I don't know if I am like most people, but I will scroll vertically for an eternity. However, I don't like horizontal scroll since I am unable to see much of the page.

On Firefox and Safari the pictures under the banner are way off to the right and in their place on the left side is about the same amount of area which is white. I tried it on AOL/Netscape, waited forever, and got a white page. I don't think I will ever try AOL/Netscape ever again. :)

I had trouble with our website when I was first making it. I kept having things overlap. Anyway, I don't know if this is helpful information or not. It is the kind of thing I like to know because I tend to forget to do it for myself and what I am working on. :-\

Such is life.

Have a good day,

Carol

[OldColonel]

Hi Carol,
Thanks for the head's up on the problem at 800x600px. I had checked the site at this resolution about a month ago in IE-7, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Netscape and everything was O.K. Now the site looks terrible in Firefox and Safari and doesn't work like it should in IE-7 and Opera.
I have the site width set to "fluid" so that it senses the screen resolution of the browsing computer and sets the width accordingly. I browse at 1024x768px and everything is great at that resolution.
I'm going to spend the evening trying to track down the problem. When I get things fixed I'll post a note here.
Thanks again for letting me know about the problem.
Bill Whicher

[flutem3]

Hi, Bill,

You are certainly welcome. I am not a pro at this, but I can see the "white on the page".

I did not tell you which might make a difference that my OS is XP, and I run IE6. I have never been able to download IE7 so that it worked properly. I have tried several times, but it never "took" so to speak. Maybe I will try it again. Is it possible to run both IE6 and IE7 at the same time. Well, come to think of it, that probably wouldn't work because usually when downloading something like that it uses some of what already exists.

I like IE6 as well as XP. I doubt that I will ever get Vista. I will probably use XP until it won't work any more....about two months or so. :D How long do you think XP will continue to be a viable OS? I can't afford to buy everything that comes out.

I am looking forward to seeing what you end up with on your website. It is refreshing to me to hear you say that people in your church care enough about the website to have an opinion about it.

Bless you in your ministry,

Carol

[flutem3]

HI, Bill,

I just reread your letter. On IE6 the website looked fine on 800x600. It was at the other browsers that it didn't look right. I saw it with Firefox first which is what alerted me to the problem.

Carol

[OldColonel]

Carol,
Take a look at the site now. I had to change a CSS file and resize some pictures. It should behave well at 800x600px now.
You may have to refresh or reload (I did in Firefox and Opera) so that you don't access a file stored in your cache - also I deleted the cache in IE-7, you may have to do so in IE-6.
I can not easily check the site in IE-6 without using a computer at church.
I use XP-Pro and like it. I have helped several friends with Vista and have not been impressed with it.
There are known problems with Joomla and IE-6. I hope you don't run into any of them when you check out the site. Let me know if you are successful is getting to the site and if it displays properly.
Bill

[flutem3]

Hi, Bill,

It looks fine now. I have no idea what you did...but you "done good". :D

Carol

[generalhavok]

Is it possible to run both IE6 and IE7 at the same time.
Carol:

It's not normally possible to run more than one version of Internet Explorer. There is a way to do it, and it's pretty simple: Multiple IE's.

http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

This free download will create multiple installs of Internet Explorer so that you can view a website in more than one version. I've been using it for well over a year with no problems.

Two bits of info:

1. It can be a little buggy at times, making you restart the program every now and then. Not a surprise, as earlier IE versions tended to be a bit unstable anyway.

2. I've found that you can't paste a URL into the IE6 install. I've found it easiest to hit Ctrl + O (keyboard shortcut for "open") and paste there.

Otherwise, it's a pretty seamless way to test a site. I test everything I make in IE6, IE7, Firefox 2, Opera something, and the latest Safari. I'd like to test more, but haven't expanded the list.