It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here and it’s because I’ve been busy busy busy! Now, I’m making myself available for some new business opportunities if they come along and to supplement my resume I built a website! Novel right?
Well, I hope I took a bit of a different spin on it scheming it like facebook, have a peak! www.FlorianMettetal.com
What I would like your help with is fixing the Recommendations page! (click recommendations on the left, doing some .htaccess hacks soon so I can use a url with jquery.switcher-panel).
The divs look like crap, I’m honest - I hate it. But, I also know that I’m not great with all this CSS stuff! So if you could help me out and make it look a bit prettier I would really appreciate it! P.S. that page populates from a db.
Thanks so much for your help! I really really appreciate it.
One thing it lacks is breathing room (or in web dev terms, whitespace). The text is crashing against the gray edges. The eye likes room between content and box borders. When everything is crashed together, it causes confusion for the eye. Try placing some padding and spacing between elements and you will be surprised at what a difference it would make.
This doesn’t relate to your query, but the scripted site-in-one-page approach gives cause for concern.
Let’s say you’d like a potential client or employer to view your Recommendations. The wonder of the conventional web is that you can send them a link to that page on your site. Here, you must send a link and also instruct them to click on the Recommendations link.
The “pages” cannot be bookmarked.
The Back button does not work.
Search engines will index the hidden content of your page, so visitors arriving at your site via a search may not find the content they expect, and trundle off.
With javascript off, no content is visible apart from the words “All graphics, layout, and design are the property of Facebook” (presumably they gave permission…).
The menu items, apart from the PDF download, are not links so provide no means to navigate the content from the keyboard or without javascript.
I can see the appeal of having everything fade in and out without loading new pages, but you need to balance this against the requirements of basic functionality and accessibility for users and search engines.
It’s entirely your choice of course, just checking you’re aware of the consequences.
You raise a number of valid points, and thank you for that! I may switch to the more conventional include schema, but I have also been playing with .htaccess redirects / js mods so that you can at least use links.
As for search engines, that is a major problem right now and I agree. At the moment the website has robots.txt: Disallow: / . So I haven’t gotten to that bridge yet, I wanted to make the site good before unleashing it to search.
Perhaps if they don’t have JS I should just give an error saying js is required to view the site, and a link to download the pdf. Honestly, the site is only meant to be a supplemental to my resume, not a replacement for it. Though I suppose I should start viewing it as an equivalent since everyone else is.
I have thought of moving the timeline view to a separate page and doing an accordion, more old fashioned/recognizable approach for the resume. Just might have to wait until this weekend to put it together.
Thanks! I will play with this a bit more today.
As you said, i’m not using their design for profit. Also, one of the companies that is reviewing my resume is Facebook so it’s also supposed to be targeted towards them.
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Thank you everyone for your input! I really appreciate it and I will appreciate any other input you may have regarding the css for the recommendations page or anything else for that matter.