TV Whirl (at 5) - Revision 13 (5/4/2006)

It's like the late 90's never ended with you, eh? Must be colourblind or all out ignorant of progress in the whole web design state of affairs since '97.

(Yeah, yeah, I'm well aware of when it came from but the usual site doesn't look much better, rabbit.)

Wonderful! You should add spinning .gifs everywhere, too, and boxes saying how it works with Internet Explorer 2.0 and Netscape 4.

Nice new look even if i may say just a little outdated. There's just one tiny problem though, None of the video links work.

Well I had planned to leave the April Fools look up a little longer, but I admit I'd missed that problem, as its an Internet Explorer specific bug and I'd mainly tested with Mozilla. >.< Given that, I've reverted to the birthday look until I finish the *real* 7th day, which true to form with me is late.

(You'd all be amazed at how many angry emails I actually got about this new look o.o)

TV Whirl (at 5) - Day 7/7 (again) - Revision 13

Okay, its been delayed somewhat (for reasons explained in more detail on the homepage, but basically there was a *lot* of work to do), but the seventh day of the birthday updates is now online. With it comes a rather drastic new lick of paint (though not quite as drastic as the April Fools day one), as well as addressing a lot of long running issues with the site, auditing every single link on there so there shouldn't be any broken links left (I'm timing how long it takes someone to prove me wrong), and increasing the size of all the preview images.

(For those interested, all the pages are now XHTML1.1 compliant. That took some doing )

Even for your hard work in making it totally XHTML 1.1 comp, it still looks like "My Very Frist Webpage!!1!!11", circa 1997 and refuses to be coded so it actually plays ball with IE6, regardless how much IE6 itself refuses to play ball with new code.

Fix it. And no, I will not stop ribbing you on your idea of a nice webpage.

A nice layout change, but I feel the design is still stuck in the mid 90's.

Well I wasn't particularly expecting any praise from Nini, but I am curious as to what exactly isn't working in Internet Explorer 6. I tested the site fully in both that and Mozilla during development, and in actual fact there's a lot of extra code in there specifically to force IE to work. With the exception of a few background images on the download pages in IE6, I cant see any problems functionality wise. Are you sure NTL aren't caching the stylesheets somewhere?

As for being stuck in the 90s, with the exception of overloading the page with flash, I'm really not sure exactly what *isn't* being stuck in the 90s. It doesnt use frames, or excessively overuse tables, which were both products of the 90s. Perhaps its the purple colourscheme, but that has to stay either way, as thats about as synomous to the site as blue is to TVHome.

What I meant, was the design and the design background, you just don't really see that much anymore.

Well I can always change the background at a later date if I can come up with something better, but there are finite limits upon what I can put out graphic-wise, as I am not and never will be a graphic designer trained in use of £1000 worth of software here. Ideally the two main design criteria are that it should:-

a) Be heavily purple
b) Somehow incorporate whirling or swirling, to match in with the name

These aren't based upon any concern over what other sites are doing, or what is the current trend in design, they're just fundamentals of what fits in with TV Whirl. After getting as far as revision 11 without managing to make anything pleasing out of the 'Whirling' part of the criteria, I finally went with the rounded-corner-rectangles, as they have some vague semblance of a Television screen with added curves. It looked better than some of the past efforts with whirls, so I stuck with it, which has been the main basis in terms of design for R13.

It may be far from perfect still, but the alternative would be to spend forever working on designs that are never released publically, without any concentration going onto bringing out the actual content of the site. Nini, I am sorry to say, is an example of this latter category which is largely why her site never made it online.

Savage bitch, it was a content problem and you know it! Anyway, it's still pisspoor and even if I'm not fully versed in the art of pretty and easily maintained websites, you should be. I dabble, you work in it, you can do better and your excuses will not float! You may not be trained but neither is Asa, he got Benjy to deal with the layout so I'm suggesting if you can't then get someone else who can. Otherwise it's top notch, no? At least get something to break up the monotony of lurid purple, it's hurting ikkle children's eyes or something.

Actually you had the content. We both know you're a very fine artist, and you had plenty of stuff to put together into a site even from the off. You just refused to tie it down to a site, worrying constantly over the design, coming up with something nice... then throwing it out for no reason, until it just never got done.

Yeah, the thought about getting someone else to work on design did cross my mind before, but the fact of the matter is I'm quite stubborn and prefer to work on my own, good or bad. Its the same reason why whenever someone has announced they're closing down a site and anyone who wants to use the content is welcome to ask, I've *never* responded. (With the case of TVBox, it was only because Ashley specifically got in touch with me that I took it onboard here).

Breaking up Purple has always been a bit hard to do. If you want me to go back to the Revision 2-8 schema where its broken by bright green and turquoise I can, but that seemed even worse. Likewise the attempts to add some colour to the Main Logo in Revision 9 looked ghastly and out of place. In terms of now, the image previews are designed to add some colour (and with the homepage, its still under development as mentioned on there). I have tried a few times to mix in some logos of stations and such to the background too to add some more variety, but I could never come up with something I was happy with.

And you still didnt answer what's wrong with Internet Explorer, no?