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Dec 19, 2014, 04:05 AM
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An alternative to redesigning J2O is create some competition for it. This way site admins aren't tasked with such a high percentage of jazz fans' requests. And it gives others the chance to contribute. Plus creating some variety and new ideas on the internet.

My web design skills are mostly limited to HTML, JavaScript and graphics in MS Paint. Paint isn't that useful for creating detailed works of art but is good at allowing small fixes or fine tuning like pixilation edits.

When I started web coding, the big question was can you do frames, and can you make it so the frame goes away if you click on an external link. Frames are a highly outdated concept since using image files as URL links became popular. This allows for better-looking navigation systems such as the graphic text links in J2O's header bar to forums, downloads, etc. Graphic links instead of text links for navigation make a site look more unique, and partially ensure that the link will have the same placement in the site's layout on any page on the site.

JavaScript is used as a versatile add-on to HTML-based sites. Typically JavaScript features require clicking for activation. I think that some typical outdated uses for JavaScript are designing pop-up windows where the user can click a button on the pop-up to close it and the pop-up doesn't repeatedly spawn until the computer's turned off. Also IIRC JavaScript was used for old menu items such as drop-down selection bars and radio/poll options, but I wouldn't use JavaScript to send feedback to an online place that'll store the feedback. In other words, I don't recommend JavaScript to send an email copy of user input from a webpage. JavaScript should never save information to the server online.

Radio options with JavaScript should work for changing background color of the webpage, or changing other color-based visual aspects. Drop-down menus can work for a compressed listing of terminologies, for displaying a subset of references or maybe for studying the properties of unstable isotopes of a chemical element. Or for explaining what accent marks can be applied to an alphabetical letter, like a/ä/á/â/Ã(-)/Ã¥/æ. Yeah, on my phone I used a dropdown menu for those accents, although they dropped up. Who knows. I'm not a fan of using dropdown menus for site navigation since it necessitates multiple clicks and more time just to move onto another area of the site. I don't like making selections in dropdown menus because options beside the one you click on aren't visible. And the old-school ideal of having a JavaScript-enabled graphical numerical counter for how many views an HTML file gets, it just silly and I'm glad authors stopped thinking that way on every fan site ever made.

HTML is good for editing the layout of a site. An advanced method of designing an interactive site with user registration and user-generated content would be to design the site overlay in HTML, to allow changes in the site's interface organization. Codes in HTML like hidden frames with no URL links, paragraph code and indented paragraphs for sections of the code are highly useful for changing things like a box of information that has to be updated at regular intervals over time. Within a visual window that doesn't cover the whole page, you could call a function from another language in an external file that would display the content without having to update any code in the file loaded by the viewer, or the index page file. This means no breaking the appearance of the webpage when some back-end infrastructure for generating or reproducing user-created content is broken. And it means easily moving around parts of the site which are represented by passages of code.