Sections FT Home Features Interviews FR Projects FR Places FR Magic FR NPC's FR Fiction Top 10 Sites Odds & Ends Classifieds Feedback The Staff Peter Oliva Chris Labonville Mike Vandergrift Mike Lejeune Chris Warter Mike Unknown Hargrid Tenslayer Staff Details		Volume 1, Number 2 June/July 1999 Site Seer The Site Seer By Chris Warter [Defrag]    By the power of Mystra I will one day know all of the AD&D/Realms related websites out there by heart. But for now I will just have to wing it by surfing and and suggestions from our readers. I am the Site Seer for the Forgotten Times. It is my job to surf the net and find all the killer AD&D/Realms websites that have useful content and a good clean style. If you would like to suggest a site for review, please e-mail FTsubmit@bigfoot.com with the site URL, and I will try to get it in the next issue. I rate the sites on 5 different qualities and then give it an overall rating. The 5 qualities are: Layout - The overall site layout. Is it pleasing to the eyes? Navigation - Can you find what you want? Content - Groovy site and all, but is there anything there? Originality - How much of it is original material? Realms Relevance - Does it relate to the Realms? For this issue, I wanted to go thru the Forgotten Realms webring and review some of the sites there. So, without further ramblings from me, here are this issues Top 10. Number 10 - Exeter's Pad http://members.aol.com/exeterspad Area Rating Layout 2.5 Navigation 2 Content 3.5 Originality 3 Realms Relevance 4 Overall 3.0 The webmaster of Exeter's Pad wanted us to review his site, saying "I realize that I may not receive a positive review, but I think just having my site seen by others that come to the Forgotten Times and being given *some* feedback is better than nothing." Well here goes. First the HTML. Concidering this is a work in progress, I will be lenient. :) Background color. Every page should have a hardcoded bgcolor. Although Windows defaults the window background color to white, not everyone has it set up that way. For me, my window background color is light grey, so I couldn't read the text on the page. Let's move on to the background image. I access the net thru a T1, so most pages come up quite speedy for me, but for this site, it took forever to draw the background image. I can only imagine what it would be like on a 28.8 modem. Also, the background image has a line on the right side denoting the right margin (I would guess), however the content of the page isn't a fixed width to stay in that margin, so for me (browsing at 1280x1024) at full screen the text went well outside of the margin. A fixed width table should fix that. Navigation, pretty basic. No quick menu, but links in the content. Content, there's not a lot there, but what is there is worth reading (Check out Hill's Edge for example). Overall, with some minor HTML fixes, and added content this site could be a winner and make it to your favorites list. Number 9 - http:// Area Rating Layout 2.5 Navigation 2 Content 3.5 Originality 3 Realms Relevance 4 Overall 3.0 Number 8 - http:// Area Rating Layout 2.5 Navigation 2 Content 3.5 Originality 3 Realms Relevance 4 Overall 3.0 Number 7 - http:// Area Rating Layout 2.5 Navigation 2 Content 3.5 Originality 3 Realms Relevance 4 Overall 3.0 Number 6 - http:// Area Rating Layout 2.5 Navigation 2 Content 3.5 Originality 3 Realms Relevance 4 Overall 3.0 Number 5 - http:// Area Rating Layout 2.5 Navigation 2 Content 3.5 Originality 3 Realms Relevance 4 Overall 3.0 Number 4 - http:// Area Rating Layout 2.5 Navigation 2 Content 3.5 Originality 3 Realms Relevance 4 Overall 3.0 Number 3 - http:// Area Rating Layout 2.5 Navigation 2 Content 3.5 Originality 3 Realms Relevance 4 Overall 3.0 Number 2 - http:// Area Rating Layout 2.5 Navigation 2 Content 3.5 Originality 3 Realms Relevance 4 Overall 3.0 Number 1 - http:// Area Rating Layout 2.5 Navigation 2 Content 3.5 Originality 3 Realms Relevance 4 Overall 3.0 [ Copyright/Credits | Submission Guidelines | Subscribe ]