[COLUG] Ubuntu / Firefox / Web Design

[Paul Williams]

On Mon, 2007-04-09 at 08:52 -0400, Mark Erbaugh wrote:
> I have volunteered to help my church with their website, but I am not a
> professional website designer. I am working with another volunteer who
> is somewhat familiar with Microsoft Front Page.  The website is just a
> tool to provide information and consists of a bunch of static HTML
> pages.
> 
Drupal would be much easier for the church people to use than FrontPage,
I think.

> Two parts of the website need to be updated on a regular basis: The
> monthly newsletter and the weekly calendar of events.  The church
> secretary creates both of these using Microsoft Publisher because the
> primary destination is printouts.  She is not familiar with other
> programs, so she would prefer to keep using Publisher.  I'm new to this
> church and not ready to start pushing for wholesale changes to Open
> Source.
> 
> Microsoft Publisher has an option to save the document to HTML. However,
> it doesn't do a very good job. It seems to have a problem with the
> flowing of text around graphics. While things look fine in the printed
> output, the text runs over the graphics in HTML, and there are other
> problems. Obviously the export to HTML was an afterthought in the design
> of Publisher.  I did some web research and discovered that Scribus will
> not import Publisher files.
> 
> The other volunteer loaded this HTML into Front Page and rearranged
> things to clean up the overlap. He had everything looking acceptable
> with Internet Explorer, but when I looked at the website with Firefox,
> there were several places where the text overlapped other text or
> graphics.  This overlapping was present with Firefox on both Ubuntu
> Dapper and Windows XP, but was worse on Ubuntu.  I had the other
> volunteer go back and add some additional spacing until there was no
> overlapping in Firefox.  The website is usable, but not what I would
> consider attractive.
> 
The problem is that the stylesheet is trying to put things places, but
FrontPage is using  position:absolutes, which are awful. In order to
ensure cross-platform compatibility, I would suggest one of you learn
basic CSS and either code-from-scratch, or use a tool like Nvu -
http://www.nvu.com or SCREEM - http://www.screem.org

<plug>Or, you could hire a strapping young high-school web designer like
me - http://www.smoothweb.net/
I'd even be willing to cut a nice deal for a fellow COLUGer
</plug>

Anyways, I'll take a look at which specific stylesheet attributes are
causing the text overlap when I have some free time. 

-- 
Thanks,
Paul Williams - paul at smoothweb.net
Support Free Software: http://www.fsf.org