layout opinion needed

[Jo]

Hi all

I finally managed to come up with first layout of my web including hyper link of each menu in navigation bar and as I promised, here check out my site....

www.cookingkorean.com

Please let me know what you think....

I still have a long way to go but find myself getting hooked...

One question here;
When you type in www.cookingkorean.com, it will direct you to main page and if you click Home on the menubar, the browser address changes to
www.cookingkorean.com/index.htm.

How can I make people type in www.cookingkorean.com in browser and it automatically redirect the address to www.cookingkorean.com/index.htm?
Does anyone know?

Jo

[Spock]

It seems a little light on content right now but it's a start. :)

The program index.html is the default program that runs every time anyone visits your main website page. There is no need to type anything other than your basic URL unless you want them to go directly to a page different than your main index page.

For instance, if you wanted someone to go directly to your forum, you would have them type in http://www.cookingkorean.com/forum.htm and they would go directly there. Otherwise, www.cookingkorean.com or possibly even cookingkorean.com typed into the Address bar would take them to your main website index page.

[PsychoticDude85]

Why is it important that it does that? You get the same web page in both instances. It seems like a feature with no real purpose to me...

Anyway, as to the site, the design is pretty basic - but that could be ok depending on what the main content areas end up looking like (three "x"s are not all that descriptive ;-)). Certainly doesn't look bad.

As to the markup code, that's not so good. A few reasons why (that you may want to look into):
- Table tags for anything other than tabular data is bad, it's unsemantic and also they also increase rendering time in some browsers (including IE, so it's slow for the majority of people).
- Overuse of the style="" attribute, look into a seperate CSS file, this is superior for several reasons, the first being that it seperates style information from content, the second being that it makes it much easier to theme and the third being that external CSS files are cached, so it reduces the amount of bandwidth used by your site.
- Spaces used between links instead of a list (<ul>), this is semantics again, if you've got a list of links then you should present it in an unordered list, because that has meaning.

Other than that, not bad.

EDIT: Seems I replied just after Spock (or as seems more likely I just took a long time to finish this reply), and since I'm a pedant I have to note that HTML files are not programs, HTML is not a programming language, it's a markup language, you cannot write programs in HTML. What happens in this case is down to the DirectoryIndex which is a set of webpages that the HTTPd will attempt to serve to a user when visiting a directory if no particular file is specified. "index.htm" and likely also "index.html" are included in the DirectoryIndex, so when visiting a directory it attempts to locate those files. Since index.htm does exist, it serves this file. If it does not, it will usually display a directory index (unless they are disabled).

[Spock]

... HTML files are not programs ...

Correct as always, I guess I'm just getting lazy ... or trying to simplify so the explanation doesn't cause any more confusion. In actuality, there are only 3 extensions that I know of that denote actual programs; .bat, .com, and .exe ... all else are data files of one type or another that are used by the programs to control the display of information.

[Terminator1138]

changed title as you are not asking for a full review but comment on layout only.

[Jo]

Hi ! all

Thank you so much for all your input and feedbacks.....
I have tried to fix some of points you guys made up there since this evening....and now it is 3:25am without any success.
Well...I am going to move on, do what I can do, publish my website, and fix up later along the way as I learn more....
I am satisfied with my layout since , up until a month ago, I thought HTML was a name of hip-hop group.

Thank you again....

Jo