I have an old website for my games and want to give it a new look. Anyone know of a good, inexpensive web designer who does RPG sites?
Nobody?
Reskinning, I think. The original design is eleven years old and didn't take into account the size of modern computer monitors. All the information sits in the central third or so of the screen, leaving large wasteful black blanks down both sides.
However the designer made some very nice header art for each section of my site (history, religion, house rules, etc.) and reusing them would require someone with more design knowledge than I have.
The site in question: Theeurth
Inexpensive = Hundreds, not thousands.
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OK, so I took a quick look at the source code of several pages.
The styling is a mix of embedded styles and inline styles. Use of CSS would make updates to the layout much simpler.
The pages are built using a table structure within containing divs. Tables are great for some things, but for general page layout straight out divs are typically the best option.
It looks like the site is not built using a CMS (if you are looking at adding additional content, you really need to look into moving to a CMS ... WordPress should suffice and has an easy to use backend for page creation, etc.).
The site itself consists of about 250 some odd pages. With the current structure and lack of CSS, each of these pages would need to be updated rather than making changes to a single style sheet. Additionally, if you move to a CMS, the content from these pages would need to be transferred.
I have no idea what you just said. :-)
But I -do- know that I've had no difficulty updating pages using Frontpage or whatever it's called now. I'd prefer not to transition to some new system I'd have to learn.
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Sorry, let me clarify some of the above:
CSS - Cascading Style Sheets - a document your pages link to which contains the styling information (what font is being used, what the background looks like, the width of the content area, the placement of the various elements of the page relative to each other, etc.) to be used for your site. This allows you to enter "style1 {xyz}" in one place and call it from any page. If you ever need to modify the look of "style1", you only need to change it in one place, not on all 250 pages.
Embedded Styles - The styling information is contained within a <style></style> section in the <head> area of your page. Each page would need to be modified if a site wide change is made, but these styles would all be in a set location.
Inline Styles - The styling information is contained within lines of the HTML. As this form of styling can be anywhere on the page, each page would need to be reviewed in its entirety when making any site wide layout adjustment.
Table Structure - <table></table> allows the placement of content into rows (<-tr><-/tr> ... less the dashes as the forum appears to register the tr elements in the body of a post as a new row) and cells (<td></td>); basically the same kind of structure you see in a spreadsheet. While a table structure is great for displaying tables of data, it is less than ideal for handling general page layout (the layout is not very flexible). A dramatic redesign can lead to complete recoding of a page if it is built using table structure.
Div - <div></div> is a block level element used to group HMTL content. More importantly, they can be assigned ids and/or classes which can be used for styling purposes.
CMS - Content Management System - A framework which allows for ease in handling content. With 250+ pages, your site could definitely benefit from this. Additionally, CMS solutions such as Wordpress make the addition of new content pretty much as easy as just typing the content into a text document.
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As to utilizing Frontpage, that's great if that's what you want to use. Just know that site wide updates, if you stay with your current structure, will require updating each of the 250 pages individually. If you are looking to pay someone to update your site while maintaining the current structure, that increased time requirement will result in an increase in cost.
Thanks for the clarification. Whippersnappers! In -my- day, we used BBS's and badly printed mimeographs! :-)
It sounds as though CSS and a CMS would be ideal. I suppose I will have to learn some new tricks. I've been wanting to do some light blogging anyway, and Wordpress would make that a lot easier, I imagine.
Anyway, this allows me to circle back to my original question: Do you (or anyone reading this) know of a designer prepared to do some of that?
... I don't know how to PM. I've sent you an email. Thanks for your time!