AWSUM.org.uk is starting to amass a small collection of reviews over at Rev.iew.me, and most are fairly positive. However, in the more recent ones, people are complaining that the navigation is too big and that it’s a little distracting from the main content. So, I’m considering making it a little bit smaller, in both width and font size (which would also make the main content area a little wider). You can preview what it looks like here.

Now, my question to you, dear reader, is this: Which do you prefer? The small navigation, or the big one I have now? People seem to have mixed opinions about the latter. Some love the big bold layout, while others don’t. So, please, comment with your opinion and whether or not you’d rather see a smaller navigation, with a little more room for content, or keep it the way it is?

Oh, and on that little preview page, you can also try out two new colour styles I’m thinking on adding: Licorice, for all you morbid folk out there, and Strawnana (strawberry and banana), which uses two different colours, rather than two shades of the same one.

Hello there! New domain, new design! Totally awesome, yes?

You can even change colours!

Also, while we’re at it, you can also give the site a review at Rev.iew.me, a new community-based site for reviewing websites. Lovely-jubbly.

So, we’re doing a module in my computing course at college where we are eventually going to have to build a web application. Basically a web site with some flashy and interactive stuff on it.

However, this course assumes that you have absolutely no experience whatsoever when it comes to making web pages. So, we were given a brief intro to HTML and told to go off and make a simple web page.

I went off and coded this completely from scratch (well, apart from the doctype declaration, which I copied and pasted) in Notepad in a few minutes. Meanwhile, my friend sitting next to me was like “WTF!?” and asking me how to change the colour of text.

The proper way to do this would be to create a CSS class and use that. However, since this guy is completely new to web design and was thus having trouble using HTML tags properly, I thought best to not go down that road. And everywhere I looked, all I could see where awful looking pages - large, brightly coloured Times New Roman text on an equally bright and contrasting background. Maybe even with an awful, unfunny and obnoxious animated GIF playing in the background.

I can’t really blame them though. It wouldn’t surprise me if half of them had even heard of HTML before, let alone have ever used it. I’ve been using it for close to four years now, and have been striving to code in W3C compliant XHTML for a while now as well. So I guess it’s only natural that I feel this way. I’ve a feeling this module is going to be much more of the same.

Apparently we’re going to be taking an actual Web Design module during the second semester. Hmm, let’s see how that turns out. I really hope we do some server side scriping at some point as well. Although I highly doubt we’ll be using PHP if we do. Probably ASP or something like that.

I also, at some point on the near future, may be going down with a friend or two to visit a couple of mates who are at Uni. One in Glasgow and one in Dundee. Should be great fun if I can get it organised.

Anyway, that’s all.