Tracy Gander's dashboard

Hi Dana,

I'm afraid the two-tone background won't work well in this application. This Style is suited to sites with no fixed placement of elements - the Style will automatically center in the middle of the browser window. As you cannot control how wide people will set their monitor (add to this screen resolution issues), you can never control where your left column will intersect with the blue colour band of your background. Secondly, it's not advisable to use such a large file as a background as this may greatly slow down the download of your website causing frustration for your visitors.

My suggestion is the following:
• Source a new gold file that tiles well. Remember text will be overlaid so be careful to not use something that's too colourful or contrasting. Your text must be legible.

• Select one of the sister Styles that use a horizontal navigation and use the left column for your Blog widgets. I'd suggest SqueakyClean or SqueakyClean Black (depending on what colour you need your text to display in - black text or white).

• When changing the Background image, insert a colour value that matches the overall colouration of your image- this way it's less jarring when looking at the page background colour whilst you wait for your image to load up.

• Change the page Layout to 2-Column-Right (narrow left column) and drag your Blog widgets into this left column.

• Add the Neffertiti image into the top of the left column for added visual interest. Use the Image widget for this. This way, the image will flow with your content no matter how wide or long the browser display is.

I've played in Marije's account to illustrate what I mean by this: http://sitebuilder.yola.com/sites/D22...

I hope this helps get you on the path to the site you're visualising.

Hi Lee,

The question, as you can see from the commentary, is what software are you using to resize the PNG?

Sadly you're correct, Picnik does loose the transparency on export to PNG.

However, FotoFlexer does work - www.fotoflexer.com. FotoFlexer is a simple free online image editor which allows for transparent PNGs. Upload your photo, click on the Resize button, type in your dimensions and go 'Apply'. Then click on the 'Save' button and set it to PNG to save to your computer.

If you'd prefer to work offline, Gimp, a rather cool and free image manipulation app, works too. Go Image > Scale image and then File > Save as. Get it here: www.gimp.org/downloads.

Resizing using Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks will keep the transparency. Image > Image size and then File > Save As or File > Save for Web (with transparency checked).

t

The Yola logo type is custom-made so you may only find fonts similar in feel to our special type.

They do say that imitation is the best form of flattery, lol.

LOL yes, I personally can identify with the Photoshop pixel pushing dreams...

Hi Heartbeat,

It sounds like a good place to start would be some of our introductory tutorials - specifically this these two, "Building Your First Website: Lesson Two - Adding New Pages & Photos" (http://www.yola.com/tutorials/adding-...) and "Creating Sub-Pages" (http://www.yola.com/tutorials/creatin...).

To get going, start with one of our more 'blank' Styles in order to prominently display our catalogue cover as a Splash page (a preliminary page that precedes the regular home page of a Web site and usually promotes a particular site feature)- if this is your intention.

- BareNecessities
- CleanSlate
- NoFrills
- SqueakyClean

If you'd prefer something more colourful, try some of these, some of my favourite Styles:
- Burlap
- Tastelessly
- Redplanet

Can you give me some idea what form your existing catalogue is in? A PDF document, a printed booklet, etc.? I can give you further guidance as to how best to get this information online.

Good luck with your site!
t

This is great, thanks!

On the same train of thought, here are some of my favorite fun and useful free tools.

The Tartan background pattern generator: www.tartanmaker.com
Stripe generator: www.stripegenerator.com
Ribbon generator: www.quickribbon.com
Palette generator (generates a palette based on a photo): http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/colors.php

Enjoy!

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for your valid query. However, it does appear that our Lightbox displays images at the display sizes set by Flickr.

I've just tested uploading a large image (1024 x 768) to Flickr which displays on both Flickr and our Lightbox at 500 x 375 pixels. I'm guessing that this is in order to maintain visual consistency across their site.

Hi Casey,

I'll give you my thoughts from a purely web design perspective- I can't begin to compete with the technical advice that you've been given thus far.

My advice would be to avoid having too many menu items- as a rule of thumb, visitors can digest a maximum of 7 or 8 items. Too many can be confusing. Think about menu items in terms of 'sections' rather than 'pages'. The language used to label each menu item is important, it needs to clearly indicate what your visitor is going to find on those pages.

For example, your menu might read like this: Home, About, School, Recommendations, Articles, and Contact. In addition, you can make your Home page more effective by moving bio info out into the 'About' section, and adding information like 'Trade-of-the-day' and the 'E-book'. Play with the new Layout tool and use the 2 or 3 column options to neatly display various bits of information. To further enhance the site, you can create "index" pages for each of the major sections (eg. School). By this I mean a mini-home page - each 'section' can operate like a mini-site but without having to build a whole new site from scratch.

If you still feel strongly that you'd like to include more items in your primary menu, I'd suggest that you try the sister Style to the one you're currently using - it's called 'BareNecessities' and is identical other than the left-hand menu bar. Yes, the down-side of changing Style is that you'll need to update the banner image on all your pages, sorry. This is a limitation that you'll need to factor into your decision.

Some of these concepts are tricky to explain. I hope that this helps you refine your site to something even more impressive!

Good luck!

Tracy

Hi Sylvia,

These are some of my favourite styles that should accomplish many of your requirements. All make use of a top navigation and are simple and elegant, perfect for the display of your photos.

For a super-minimal look (these styles do not have banner images):
- NoFrills
- SqueakyClean

In addition, these styles allow for an editable banner image:
- Tastelessly
- CleanSlate
- Redplanet

You indicated that you'd prefer a white background. Several of the styles I listed allow for custom background images. To replace these, click on the Background Image button in the right-hand Properties side-bar- you can make your own "white" background (by uploading a 10 x 10 pixel white jpeg) to replace an existing background.

I'm not aware that any of our styles support the use of Gill Sans as it's currently not a commonly used system font.

We currently do not support custom site title text although you can of course alter your text within the content area using the Text editing tools.

Good luck with your site!

Tracy

Hi Dean,

The style you've opted to use (RedPlanet) only allows for a single horizontal navigation. However, I'd suggest that you think carefully about the content in each of those pages and treat them as 'sections' rather than 'pages'- eg. within Courses you can create individual pages for "Beginners courses", "Swim and Run courses", "Bike courses", etc. It's fairly easy to add your own 'sub-navigation' on these pages using the Two-column and Text widgets.

If this sounds overly complex, you might switch to a style that uses a vertical navigation which will allow as many number of pages as you wish. The following styles do allow for a left-hand navigation as well as an editable banner area (my choice would be to use BareNecessities, NoFrills or Innovate):
- BareNecessities
- Decayed
- NoFrills
- Capsicum
- Innovate
- Entomology
- Pollinate

For more information on Style data, go here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?ke...

Good luck, your site's looking great!

Tracy

FYI, we currently have 5 styles where you can add a background:

1. Tastelessly
2. CleanSlate
3. BareNecessities
4. NoFrills
5. SqueakyClean

These styles can be found in the first 10 of the style selection (click on 'Change Style' to see the style selection).

To change your background on your page, follow these steps:

1. Click on the "Properties" tab on the sidebar on the right.
2. At the bottom of the "Properties tab", under "Background image" click on the three dots (...) to choose or upload an image.
3. Click on "OK" and the image will be added as a background to your page.

Please note that the background will apply to that specific page and not to the whole site. To remove the background image, follow the same steps above and click on the 'None' button in the image selector dialog box that opens. – Tracy Gander, on February 12, 2009 09:48

Hi Lycan76,

Apologies for my tardy reply, I've been away and am catching up.

I'm afraid that we don't support CSS customisation (in order to alter the code for your background image). However, you can easily add an image on several of our Styles using the Resource Manger.

Tracy

Hi Dan,

Please can you post an image/version of your file so that I can get a better sense of what it is that you're trying to achieve? Thanks.

Tracy

Hi Lycnan76,

Perhaps you can give me some idea of what it is that you're trying to achieve?

Image slicing is how many applications like Photoshop or Fireworks chop and code images for use as navigation requiring roll-overs, etc. It is not the best way to build an entire web-page however. Here's a link to explain it's usage and may help to clarify things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slicing_(web_design)

A background image can be tiled in order to enhance download speed. Here are some handy background image generators that may inspire you.

http://www.bgpatterns.com/
http://bgmaker.ventdaval.com/
http://www.stripegenerator.com/

Here's a basic introduction to image slicing: http://www.elated.com/articles/introd...

I hope this has been helpful,

Tracy

Folks, I've posted my query on Adobe's forum directly. Thus far, I've had a one-line response, see link below in the event that it's useful to anyone.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=14&catid=193&threadid=1407409&CFID=5465385&CFTOKEN=db200337d8728c4-4FF333E5-A33B-752A-4D86E8CB54C10321&jsessionid=4830ae50dcc763b787543a164212717f2613