New GFC Site is UP!!!!

Hescominsoon

Hescominsoon

CGA\TOJ Hosting Manager
We have moved to a new server and a new website! The address is the same:

http://www.godsfrozenchosen.com

If you hit any dead links, errors, issues please let us know as this is only the initial new draft. We have huge plans for the future.

Thanks to our frozen leader Eskimo Pie and Geneses1315 for their ongoing hard work.
 
Yep its up and going! Tell us what you think and any problems you find. So far I do know of a few, and those are being worked on with all due haste!

If you have a suggestion Please let either myself or Genesis1315 with it. :)
 
Hey my website has gone bye-bye. I only use my MySpace page now.

You may also want to kill the GFC Ministry link as well... that page has not been up in a while.

No more IRQ, haven't used that in like 5 yrs.

And no more AOL either.

Also... my GW name is now longer Deep Sweetch (he's been retired). I now have Not Uncommon and Heal Yo Ouchies.


Sorry for all the requests for changes. :D
 
No worries, I'll make the changes here soon. :) Your website will be removed. The GFC ministry link will be retooled and re set up. :) So it stays.

I'll fix the Guild wars names as well. So no to the AOL and the ICQ. I'll remove those as well.

Don't be sorry for making the requests for the changes. :) I have an expensive program that will allow me to do this rather easily. I'll be fixing it soon. (Prolly work on it a bit later today.)
 
The site looks nice, but I noticed a few things, from a usability perspective.
  1. There's no link back to the home page. While not required, it's common practice.
  2. the left navigation images don't have ALT tags. Again, not required, but common practice.
  3. Left navigation are images.
    There are a couple of reasons why this is not good. First it's hard to change the text of the link. Second, the text isn't scalable for folks who need to view text at a bit higher resolution than others. Third, there's no real indication that they're links - the text isn't underlined and does not react when you mouseover it in anyway.

    A solution to this, is to cut the snowflake off the images and just put the snowflake image up on your server. Change the left nav to a unordered list, and use CSS to override the bullet to be your snowflake image. Additionally, you can set the links' font family to first try to use whatever font you're currently doing, but you'll get better, and more user-friendly behavior from your links if they look and act like links are expected to.
Then from a functionality POV, you've got these issues:
  1. the FAQ link takes you to the Roster page
  2. Left Navigation is not consistent in where it links to.
    An example: on the homepage click the CALL link, and then once there, click the FAQ link. Once you're on the Roster page, try clicking the CALL link again, it'll give you a 404 error because the HREF is pointing to the wrong location. This happens on a couple different pages.
  3. Some Left navigation elements aren't links.
    While it's appropriate to deactivate the links for the page you're currently on (though a royal hassle), if you don't have content for a link yet, either have it direct to a page that states that or remove the link. This is doubly annoying since the images which make up your left navigation don't show any indications on which ones are links.
If your expensive program you're using to do this is FrontPage 4.0 as the meta tag indicates, some of these things will be a tad harder to fix than others. If you're using DreamWeaver MX or later, it'll be a lot easier. Also, there are a couple WYSIWYG web editors out there that are better than FrontPage. Including Visual Studio Web Express (which oddly enough is free and a Microsoft product). While you do get a bunch of programming ASP.Net 2.0 capabilities in Web Express, you can build traditional websites using only HTML and other static pages or even ASP or PHP pages. It then supports uploading to the server via FTP, FrontPage Extensions and WEBDAV.

Also, if you need help, shoot me a PM and I'll answer any questions that I can.
 
Thanks for the offer of Help Kidan! I (and Gen) really appreciate it.

The site is still a work in progress and thank you for pointing out the broken linking (I'll fix it very soon) I thought I had found them all, but with as many pages as Gen and I made it doesn't really surprise me that a few slipped through.

As far as the left side links go, I plan on switching some of them out for something else later. I have already put into works a way to mark that as the main navigation bar. (I'll prolly just mark it for now.)

I'll make sure that you can get back to the homepage at any time by clicking the top header or something. Thanks for bringing that to our attention.

Currently I'm using Dreamweaver 8. Its all I have aside from net wiggi.

If you find anything else, please point it out. This is my first ever uploaded website. (I had a lot of help from Gen) Aside from the HTML class I took, this has been a learning experience for me. (I learned more building this website than anything I was taught.)
 
Kidan said:
The site looks nice, but I noticed a few things, from a usability perspective.
  1. There's no link back to the home page. While not required, it's common practice.
  2. the left navigation images don't have ALT tags. Again, not required, but common practice.
  3. Left navigation are images.
    There are a couple of reasons why this is not good. First it's hard to change the text of the link. Second, the text isn't scalable for folks who need to view text at a bit higher resolution than others. Third, there's no real indication that they're links - the text isn't underlined and does not react when you mouseover it in anyway.

    A solution to this, is to cut the snowflake off the images and just put the snowflake image up on your server. Change the left nav to a unordered list, and use CSS to override the bullet to be your snowflake image. Additionally, you can set the links' font family to first try to use whatever font you're currently doing, but you'll get better, and more user-friendly behavior from your links if they look and act like links are expected to.
Then from a functionality POV, you've got these issues:
  1. the FAQ link takes you to the Roster page
  2. Left Navigation is not consistent in where it links to.
    An example: on the homepage click the CALL link, and then once there, click the FAQ link. Once you're on the Roster page, try clicking the CALL link again, it'll give you a 404 error because the HREF is pointing to the wrong location. This happens on a couple different pages.
  3. Some Left navigation elements aren't links.
    While it's appropriate to deactivate the links for the page you're currently on (though a royal hassle), if you don't have content for a link yet, either have it direct to a page that states that or remove the link. This is doubly annoying since the images which make up your left navigation don't show any indications on which ones are links.
If your expensive program you're using to do this is FrontPage 4.0 as the meta tag indicates, some of these things will be a tad harder to fix than others. If you're using DreamWeaver MX or later, it'll be a lot easier. Also, there are a couple WYSIWYG web editors out there that are better than FrontPage. Including Visual Studio Web Express (which oddly enough is free and a Microsoft product). While you do get a bunch of programming ASP.Net 2.0 capabilities in Web Express, you can build traditional websites using only HTML and other static pages or even ASP or PHP pages. It then supports uploading to the server via FTP, FrontPage Extensions and WEBDAV.

Also, if you need help, shoot me a PM and I'll answer any questions that I can.
Click to expand...
Tis is a starting point. I personally am looking at putting hte site into drupal, post-nuke, or joomla so i can have our podcasts, forums, and website totally integrated under one skin w/o having to manage three different apps(aka the website, wordpress, and SMF). If you have any suggestions though let us know..<G>
 
Well, building websites is what I spend an oddly large portion of my week doing, so it's not a problem on that offer of help :)

Likewise, I'm happy to help like this, because that other portion of my week tends to be about breaking those websites that I had just built.

anyways, after you get a batch of changes done, shoot me a PM, and I'll run through the site again, hunting for such issues. It's always best to have someone not related to the project do beta/testing for you, as they're able to find things you never noticed.

And yes, I'm speaking from experience here.... *grumbles about large Test Reports*

ahh.....there's the post from HCS...

Hescominsoon said:
Tis is a starting point. I personally am looking at putting hte site into drupal, post-nuke, or joomla so i can have our podcasts, forums, and website totally integrated under one skin w/o having to manage three different apps(aka the website, wordpress, and SMF). If you have any suggestions though let us know..<G>
Click to expand...
Truthfully, I don't really know anything about any of those guys. I use Blogger for my CMS for most of my personal websites now (just need to convert my eldest boy's template into a Blogger Template and I'll be good to go) because it literally does everything I need it to...but I don't think it natively supports PODCASTS...

Ultimately though, if you use CSS for your layout/design, and you name the page elements that you want to keep common across the three different websites, then you should be able to maintain the same theme across those websites with a minimum of effort. Additionally, changing the theme would then be a matter of switching out CSS sheets and any related image files.

I'm not sure what SMF is, a quick link sent me to a forums software. Without custom building your own CMS, you'll probably need a third-party forum software. I'm not certain about joomla or nuke, but I think that's just how it's going to be.

But for the website and wordpress... well, I know blogger supports pushing out the posts to third-party servers via FTP. This allows me to have files that don't appear in my blog's history (such as an about us, etc) and still maintain the look and feel of my blog. I don't think I'm actually doing that right now, but I can if I wanted to, and plan to do so for krashpad.com -if and when I ever get some free time....

In the end, unless you're rolling out a customized CMS (or one of the very heavy packages with tons of features that you'll probably never use) you'll need to maintain multiple applications, it's all a matter of how much maintenance will be needed.
 
Last edited:
actually with joomla i can podcast, blog and everything EXCEPT forums natively inside the application(which i think is now fixed or near being fixed). I can make it all work..my big problem is making the cms'ed site look like the currnet static site..<G>
 
Hescominsoon said:
actually with joomla i can podcast, blog and everything EXCEPT forums natively inside the application(which i think is now fixed or near being fixed). I can make it all work..my big problem is making the cms'ed site look like the currnet static site..<G>
Click to expand...
ahh... well, a lot of CSS playing can rectify that as well. I'm not familiar enough with joomla and what not to be able to tell you how to skin it properly though. Sorry :)
 
Kidan said:
ahh... well, a lot of CSS playing can rectify that as well. I'm not familiar enough with joomla and what not to be able to tell you how to skin it properly though. Sorry :)
Click to expand...
i can gvie you access to the dev site(admin level) it has htmo and css tools built in. Myabe you can look at hte code and take a gander?
 
It looks real nice, blue is a good color. :D

I know its a work in progress but to let you know, Eskimo's Roster Page doesn't show the picture. Same goes with Pastorwirl's About me & Testimony "buttons".


Not Found
The requested URL /GFC stuffs/gfc1.jpg was not found on this server.

Not Found
The requested URL /About me button.JPG was not found on this server.

Not Found
The requested URL /Testimony Button.JPG was not found on this server.
 
Hescominsoon said:
i can gvie you access to the dev site(admin level) it has htmo and css tools built in. Myabe you can look at hte code and take a gander?
Click to expand...
send the information my way, and I'll look it over when I get a bit of time. Maybe this weekend sometime before I get a chance though
 
Corpfox said:
It looks real nice, blue is a good color. :D

I know its a work in progress but to let you know, Eskimo's Roster Page doesn't show the picture. Same goes with Pastorwirl's About me & Testimony "buttons".


Not Found
The requested URL /GFC stuffs/gfc1.jpg was not found on this server.

Not Found
The requested URL /About me button.JPG was not found on this server.

Not Found
The requested URL /Testimony Button.JPG was not found on this server.
Click to expand...

Thanks for pointing that out Corpfox! I'll add it to my to do list.
 
Alright. Just made some updates! Not as many as I would have liked, and I still have more links to fix. However I did add something to the main page to let people know that the left side is the link bar. (I hope it works. :))

Keep me posted if you find a broken link or image.

Updates:

Changed Coalition to Commonwealth. (Meaning provided by dictionary.com
7. any group of persons united by some common interest.
Click to expand...
) If you do not approve of this change, please let me know and suggest a new word.

added an under construction page. Linked the dead links to the under construction page.

Added small text to top of index page left side links.

fixed broken images.

Planned changes:

Turn left hand side links into buttons.

Create FAQ page

Create publications page

Work on turning the site over to joomola.

See what I can do with Dreamweaver to make the site look better. :)

Any suggestions would be most helpful!
 
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