Ideas anyone?

[ChrisHPZ]

So this morning I was listening to Ancient Aliens on YouTube and started tinkering with a website layout. Really don't know where to go from here as I'm out of ideas. It's not going to be a real website, as far as I know but knowing me that might change. To be honest, aside from the jQuery on the navigation and the Facebook comments box it doesn't get more basic than this. http://www.cdemarco.net/alien

 

[chrisix]

the bottom of the grey planes arn't aligned. And they are just too... plain

 

[ChrisHPZ]

Where do you see planes? And I'm aware that this layout is plain that's why I typed "To be honest, aside from the jQuery on the navigation and the Facebook comments box it doesn't get more basic than this." I think that indicates how much aware I am that this site is plain.

 

[cya]

Hey Chris,

your right it looks a bit plain... =) you kind of lack that mysterious look/feeling and I would change up the header image, that one doesn't quite capture the unknown of the universe.

 

[RTContent]

Don't forget, no ancient aliens website is complete without this guy.

 

[sprucemagoo1]

May I ask why there is jQuery on the navigation, what is it supposed to be doing.

 

[ChrisHPZ]

May I ask why there is jQuery on the navigation, what is it supposed to be doing.

Well sprucemagoo, the idea was to use a plugin called jQuery Color that allows for transitions between one color to another. This can also be done with CSS 3 transitions as well, but it wouldn't work with the ancient browsers such as IE8 and below. So the plan was to use this plugin, and initiate a hover event that when a user hovered over a top-level li tag, the entire navigation bar would animate from one color to another. Unfortunately, there's a snag in the plugin that makes the target, in this case the nav bar, revert to a white background and then it keeps flashing. Truth be told, I didn't look at the code in the plugin very much to see if I could fix it.

In going a different route with the navigation and jQuery, I left the script in there because I still wanted the nav bar to change colors when the top-level li tags are hovered over rather than make a global li:hover selector.

 

[ChrisHPZ]

Don't forget, no ancient aliens website is complete without this guy.

View attachment 27040

LOL, RT I was toying with the idea of including some sort of video gallery of Ancient Aliens episodes on this site. Seasons 1 through 5 are on YouTube. But I have mixed feelings. For one, I don't want this to be like a tribute to the show because it's famous enough without my help. Number two, and this might seem petty, but I can't stand working with the YouTube video player. It really is a pain in the @$$ and it doesn't always cooperate with IE 8 and below.

Anyway, made some updates today to the footer section like the inclusion of a site map and a contact form. Had to ditch the old alien.html file and save it out as a .php file since the contact form is in php. Now comes the fun part of further researching the content I'd like to include.
http://www.cdemarco.net/alien.php

 

[sprucemagoo1]

As a very silent protest, I refuse to use Internet Explorer, simply for the reason of it being complete pants.

I do love jQuery by the way.

 

[ChrisHPZ]

I don't use it either Sm, but the respectable part of me commands me to test my web work for functionality across all browsers. Personally though, IE 8 and below should have some kind of self-deleting program in it just so people keep their browsers up to date. As much as I hate to say it though, IE 9 is really not that bad to develop for.

 

[RTContent]

It's almost dead, don't worry

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

 

[ChrisHPZ]

W3C gives global usage stats if I remember correctly. At work, we have a Google Analytics account and I learned that 60% of people who view the websites we own use IE. Unfortunately, I don't know what version they are using.