www.priuspartsofnewengland.com

[PPNE]

Can some more experienced co-users of Open-Realty please offer advice on a few issues I am having with finalizing my site?

www.priuspartsofnewengland.com <-- The site address.

THE ISSUES:

1. Under the "Syndacation" Menu to the right on the home page you can see the grey of where the next menu would start if there were to be one. I can not figure out how to remove it so that "Syndacation" is the last menu offered.


2. At the bottom of the home page you see "Prius Parts of New England® is proudly owned & operated in the USA - ©2008-2009 - All Rights Reserved." then you see a blue bar under that and I want that to be gone. I would like the Lazuli template to end at the first blue bar which contains the above statement.

3. The Prius with the company info and phone number is WAY too low on the homepage and I can not seem to find the place or procedure for correcting this issue.

4. I figured out the favicon but I think it looks too small. What is the recommended resolution for this item per personal experience from other users?

5. With the Lazuli template is it possible to add a featured listing area to the bottom of the home page under the company logo? I can not find any direct answers to any of these questions so if other users could assist I would be very much grateful.

[PPNE]

Also it has just been brought to my attention that the listings are not viewable

http://www.priuspartsofnewengland.com/index.php?action=listingview&listingID=11

What do I need to do to correct this issue?

Please help.

[zarathustra]

For such a simple page, it's really not good that you have 49 validation errors. (http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.priuspartsofnewengland.com%2F index.php) I don't like to get "hung up" on validation, but we have discussed it here many times before and it's universally agreed (right?) that ironing out these errors tends to make your site "work" and in particular makes it much more likely to be cross-browser compliant without too much extra work.

Your site in particular is pretty much destroyed in FireFox (3.5) and IE8.

The last time I suggested that some users should seriously think about hiring professional, preferably local, help my comments were not received very warmly. However I can't help but reiterate that your site would very likely be much more inspiring, attractive to potential clients, professional, and well....functional, if you hired some professional help.

Finally, by way of trying to help I looked at your questions, but each of them is related to the overall issue. The rule at the bottom, at first glance I thought was a rogue <hr> tag, but it's actually part of a box. Likely that's there because one of those 49 errors is an unclosed <div> tag which is cascading through your code knocking everything out of whack. The only help I can offer is that I make my favicons here: http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

[PPNE]

Ok,

I appreciate your feedback and must say that OPen realty is supposed to be user-friendly. I only filled in the blanks, so you are telling me that the template is crap? Open Realty is good in theory but am finding it tiresome and falling short of it's purpose.:rolleyes:

[zarathustra]

Hi, I really do not mean to offend, but the best thing I can tell you is that in my experience, and I have plenty with OR, it has never fallen short of purpose. when it occasionally has done I have always found an addon, or a kind soul to help me with one. It has coped with everything I have ever wanted it to do.

It could very easily cope with your intended purpose, but the fact is that you, from what I have seen, don't have the necessary coding experience to use it to it's full potential.

Your main problem is that none of the preset templates are going to fit your site (since it's autoparts not realty) and therefore you are going to have to make significant changes to the templates. You tried that, and basically failed.

My comment about the errors wasn't just a "dig". If you took the time to resolve them then your issues numbered 1-3 would likely vanish. Issue four I addressed in my last post, and finally yes it is possible to use featured listings in that template, which is clearly explained in the docs.

In summary OR is generally user friendly, but to use it to its full potential, or to make significant changes to the templates, it is always going to require quite advanced skills (A good working knowledge of HTML and CSS at a minimum, and knowledge of php a bonus). Or, that you hire a professional to do it for you.

[JawaMan]

Ok,

I appreciate your feedback and must say that OPen realty is supposed to be user-friendly. I only filled in the blanks, so you are telling me that the template is crap? Open Realty is good in theory but am finding it tiresome and falling short of it's purpose.:rolleyes:

What zarathustra says is spot on. OR can be worked to suit most peoples needs. For me personally it can do everything I need and more, the add-ons and template features are a great way to customise the product to do so much more, it's up to one's imagination.

Having said that, there is a lot that I can't do, not because of OR, but because I don't have the programming knowledge. So the short comings of OR are not OR itself by me myself.

The problems you mention are solely to do with the template you have customised. It's not an OR problem. What ever product you use if you want to make your own template you'll come up against the similar issues if you have no HTML or CSS knowledge.

So, zarathustra suggestion to fix the errors is a good first step, there are 49 of them. Then you need to spend some time learning a little HTML and CSS, it goes a long way. Depends on your platform, Windows or Mac OS, there are some great tools to help that makes it all easier.

Good luck and don't give up on OR.

:)

[the_sandking]

Ditto on the validation errors. If any template (OR or standalone) does not display correctly and it contains a significant number of validation errors, it is most likely because your HTML/XHTML code is not properly formed. When designing HTML tables for instance, it's not uncommon to miss closing a <tr> or <td> tag or accidentally using depreciated code such as 'valign' when working with XHTML.

Also, when you have a lot of validation errors your pages will usually display differently for each web browser used, something you probably don't want.

Whatever you are using as an editor for editing your template could be causing your problems. A lot of editors insert unnecessary code and will improperly nest tables and etc, especially when using WYSIWYG (design) mode.

If you eliminate most if not all of your validation errors and things still don't look right, you are simply using the wrong code to place and arrange things in your design.