MY new website - Skinnable

[Govinda]

Opinions wanted on my new skinnable website.

Help on navigation, and design would be very helpful at this point. :)

Thanks so much.


www.intotheether.org


'Govinda'

[Pontemonti]

You are using ASP and you don't have a generic file for the skins?! What I mean is, it would be a lot smart to have one index.asp file which loads the preferred skin...(which is of course stored in a cookie)
Check out my site to see what I mean:
http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~ponte/

I think your "original" design is the best. The navigation is ok and I like the colors. The second one is ok navigation-wise, but I can't stand the font and the colors :D The third one has a neat color scheme, but I always get confused when there's nothing at the left of the main body :D

[Govinda]

Well, I like the idea of keeping the style they choose in a cookie. I'm wondering however, how that would work being that I have an intro. If I have to choose between the two, I think I would keep my intro. But I still would like to get the code for that if you could give me a link to the place you got it would be very useful :) I'd appriciate it.

I plan on adding a skin every week, and I'd like your opinions on them as well.

I just added a forum to my website, so I'd appriciate any help you have for me :)


Thanks!

'Govinda'

[Pontemonti]

I wrote that skin changer thingy for my site...not very hard :D
I don't know exactly how you would write it in ASP, though...but it goes something like this:

index page:
Does the cookie contain any information on what skin we should use?
- Yes, set a skin variable to use this skin
- No, set this skin vairable to use the default skin
(using numbers is quite smart here, so in php it would be something like:
if (isset($_COOKIE['skin'])) $skin = $_COOKIE['skin'];
else $skin = 1;

Then have all the skin information in different files...I have a header1.php and a footer1.php file for the first skin...include these header and footer files with some kind of include tag. In PHP this would be something like:
include("header" . $skin . ".php");
main body stuff goes here
include("footer" . $skin . ".php");

Then you will need a page which sets the skin...just post the skin number you want to use to it and it will set the cookie and return you to where you came from...
Something like this:
if(isset($_POST['skin'])) setcookie('skin', $_POST['skin']);

I hope that helps a little bit. I'm not sure how you would write this in VBScript or whatever it is that ASP uses (though I believe it's possible to write in "any" language if you use ASP.NET?)...shouldn't be too hard to find out, though.
Good luck! :)