SPRINKLER TALK FORUM - You Got Questions, We've Got Answers

The layout itself looks very nice. Very professional. Good job.

I can point out a couple of items that don't work for me though .
The color of the font for one. Only orange works no matter which color I choose.
Also the font will change from the one I've selected to this one when I press
enter to start a new line. I can live with both of those.

The thing that might be an issue for first time visitors to this site is where to post their
questons? Look at the forum page. Where do you click? You have to click to different pages
til you run across "new thread". What's a thread? Of course I know but does joe blow homeowner?
Those are the people we're helping here. I often wonder how many people leave without asking
a question first because they're lost.


I think something should be in plain sight on every page and in plain english. Click here to ask a queston.
To ask your question click here. Ask question here. New thread.

Quoted from "root"

Hi everyone!
How do you like the new face of the forum?
Tell me what you think, and maybe comments and suggestions?

This looks like bad code for any browser other than Internet Explorer. That makes it bad news for a lot of people, me included. The orange-on-grey links are unreadable, and the need to force a widescreen display is not evident. Side-scrolling is not fun.

Right now, I'm on a old backup computer, with a 800x600 monitor, and I do get used to sites built for 1024x768 resolutions. Wider than that is genuinely annoying . The browsers in this backup are also older versions of Opera and Firefox and Internet Explorer. Now Opera is pretty obscure, in the realm of browsers, but the fans of low-resources computers will have machines with Linux and Windows 98/ME, and the only major-league browser that still gets security updates that will operate on Windows 9x computers is Opera.

Absent a block of banner ads atop the page, I would think there would not be a specific need for any specific page width. Certainly I would be designing webpages with an eye to eliminate the need for any side-scrolling on any likely computer. One aspect of this site that I would like to see addressed is the forum posts that do not disclose the poster's location. So much advice is location-specific, that a question asked without providing a location makes an accurate reply impossible, and wastes time. I would have providing a location a requirement for making a post. I know that is easy to arrange, and a drop-down menu can be provided, so a new visitor can click on their state of residence.

One more thing that would favor eliminating page code that forces a minimum display width, are some of the new inexpensive netbook computers, that have the 7-inch screens. I saw the specs for one bargain model (less than $100) that had a 800-pixel-wide display. I would be far more likely to carry such a 'disposable' netbook than something like an iPad or whiz-bang cutting-edge cell phone.

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One more thing that gets me wondering, that is not related to the actual page code, is the time of day that attaches to these posts. It doesn't seem to relate to any US time zone, or even Greenwich Mean Time.

The time zone is believed to be Germany time.