Well I did some reading from a PDF file called "Refacing your 68classifieds site V1.0 By: Larry Hotchkiss" and attempted to do some remodeling. I think it came out pretty good, though it did take me 2 very long days of pulling my hair out to do it. Still a few tweaks to do yet. My online advertising campaigns started the 1st also, so I am excited. Let me know your thoughts of my first attempt at a real page. lol My Website Randy
Looks good. Nice job. A couple things that I might suggest from a design standpoint: Consider vertically aligning your side column headings to the vertical middle of the banner strip that they are within as well as bolding them. Consider increasing the display width of your advertising side columns. The table data width is 171 px, but the ads display width is only 120 px. You may be limiting your ad placement with just 120 px. You could easily allow 150 px ads and still allow 10 px padding on both sides. The Google text adsense ads are currently cut off due to the small width limitation. Consider allowing your site logo to be a link to the home page. Although you do have a home link, most people expect a site logo to take them home and it is much more prominent than the small text home page link. As you have your logo as the full width of the page, you could just put an empty div as the link serving the same perceived purpose. Overall, I like the design and look. Good luck!
Okay, I took your advise..... I tried my best for the banner text. About the advertising side columns...... I tried to change the Google ad code to 150...it did nothing but to push my advert to the left side of the column. I don't think Google allows changing of the size...these were pre-determined when I selected my choice from what they had to offer. Unless you can tell me otherwise??? Quote: "you could just put an empty div as the link serving the same perceived purpose." I'm not sure I know how to do this. Can I get an example? Thanks, Randy
Try this for your side column td styles for the headings: HTML: style="line-height: 12px; width: 153px; text-align: center;" For the clickable home link. just make a clear .gif or .png image. The image itself doesn't have to be big, just make it small like 2px x 2 px. Then put it in the <td> something like this: HTML: <a href="{$smarty.const.url}><img src="path/to/your/template/images/clear.gif" width="450" height="46"></a> Make the height and width about the same as the logo part of the logo image (not the whole page width, just the guys head and the text). You might also want to add a style declaration in the <img> tag to add a left margin to make the transparent image push over to where the background image starts, something like margin-left:40px; As far as the side ads go, it appears that you are allowing both image and text ads. I just noticed that when the text ads are showing, a number of the titles were cut off with only a 120px width. You don't have anything in your template to contain the ad except for the table <td> You might want to just limit your Google ads to just images, but the left hand ads that you don't have as of yet, should then be put into divs with a set width which could be up to 150px with a margin or padding of 10px on each side.
I ended up doing this for the clickable home link. I found some info on the web. Ref: clickable blank div In my CSS file I added : #empty-div{ } #empty-div a { display: block; height: 32px; width: 400px; margin-left:40px; (<---I added this via your suggestion just now) } Then on my layout.tpl I added this: <div id="empty-div"> <a href="http://www.maloneads.com"></a> <div> Seems to work good. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Thanks for the input on the ads too. I was actually thinking of making them just image ads anyway. I don't really understand everything, but I hack it up the best I can. Creating the image was fine since I used to dabble in sign making. It's the part when I have to slice it up and make it work that I have no clue what I'm doing. I really don't understand the tables part and exactly how they work. If I did then I could have planned better when designing and making the slices. I appreciate the input! Thanks again, Randy
