Spookamania! Now with efiction (HP and Orig)

I don't like it. I think that it is too noisy and overwhelming. Nice concept though.

I think maybe it's the medium color with the white on top... I don't think it works. Try a more softer approach. If you have a blue scheme with waves, don't add a hard white and black outlined scheme with dark red links. They just clash. Stick with one or the other.

To give you an idea, this is my Hedwig theme. it doesn't always show up right on all browsers (cause of the strange coding I tried to make it) so if you don't see the background at the top left, try using Firefox. http://www.potionsandsnitches.net/fanfiction/index.php?skin=Hedwig

It's based off of Tammy's BoxedIn skin and a picture of it is in her 'Personalizing Skins for Your Site' article. (You might have to be logged in to see it). http://efiction.hugosnebula.com/readarticle.php?article_id=10&rowstart=2

I took the colors for my layout from the picture itself. The owl's colors are from white to a tanish brown. The sky behind it is a dark greyish blue. That's all I used.

Wow, your hedwig skin is frigging excellent. Next to that, mine looks like I fished it out of the trash.  😳 I just dont have the skill yet to do anything like what you have, tho that is the sort of look I'm aiming for. How did you get the semi-transparent bg's in the blocks? Is it a graphic? I love the effect.

I have only just started making skins. I made one, and the other three are the same thing, I just switched out the graphics. Thank you so much for looking and for being honest. I appreciate the honesty the most.  🙂

I shall have to look closer at the skin you based yours on. I liked the layout at a glance.

Thank you! Tammy's skin was my Muse though, and she helped me with it. (It was kind of a fluke that it turned out so well on my own at first.) 😆

If you look at her skins, and her articles for making skins, she tends to focus on just a couple colors. It works well. I try to follow that, but when I have a graphic, I like to pick colors from the graphic.

I don't use a semi transparent background for the blocks, I use it for the entire main column background. It's white transparent, and my main background color is white so that's why it works. On most browsers a semi transparent background gives a blocky effect behind text, which makes text hard to read. So for my purpose it worked because the blocky area was only briefly where the header image was, but since it was white on white it didn't have the blocky effect on the rest of the page. It only fades the header a little where it overlaps. The background image I used was only like 2 pixels by 2 pixels.

This is the css:

/* The middle column. */
#maincontent {
margin: 0 30px 0 185px;
padding: 5px 1em;
height: 450px;
border: 2px solid #D7CCA5;
background-image:url("/fanfiction/skins/Hedwig/transparent.gif");
background-repeat:repeat;
}
html>body #maincontent { height: auto; min-height: 450px; margin: 0 30px 0 175px;}

The best thing to do when making skins, is to just look at a lot of different sites and layouts so you can see what you like and what works, and what doesn't. Make a mock html index page to help decide the colors and layout when you want to make a new skin.

It's better not to use a lot of graphics, or a really, really big one. They have to be loaded over and over again, which might take too long for some users, as well as use too much of your site resources. If you have a great image on the top, you don't have to repeat it in the headers of blocks. Pick a darker color from the image and you'll get the contrast effect without having to load another image. Here's an example of using a better block header image: http://www.potionsandsnitches.net/fanfiction/index.php?skin=syie2 (It's a skin I was working on for someone before I gave up, main header graphics are a little out of my league, lol)

It really depends though. Just keep trying. You'll just get better and better.

This is what I started with on my own, and improved a little: http://www.potionsandsnitches.net/fanfiction/index.php?skin=harry1

it's sometimes hard to get different looks on your own. I get stuck in the same boxed layout with different colors. Every skin I have would be the same thing if I didn't have help from others. There are different skins that come in the main eFiction download. Tammy has some great layouts that she gives out on her site, and she manages to make them all very different from each other. Start with some of those and play around with them and see what happens. 🙂

Thanks so much. I wasnt able to look at the examples (forbidden) but I pretty much understand what you're saying. I definately plan to look at Tammy's site for things to work with and also try your suggestions as soon as I have time for skins again. It's embarrassing to me to know there are 12 yr olds with better skins than me. (I should probably have my daughter make them instead lol) I definately want to improve them. I am not a person who can tolerate being bad at things like this.

Drawing inspiration for the skin colors from the graphics is what I tried to do with the blue skin you looked at, but it doesnt seem I picked the right colors. I will keep trying. I often say that I keep making graphics for my site because, every time I replace one, it's better than the last. That would apply to my skins as well I guess. I did read a tutorial on making skins, probably the one you mentioned, but I didn;t get much from it.

I'll see what I can do and post a link when I think I might have something worth looking at. Thanks again for the advice. Much appreciated!

Here's the link to the articles about skinning on my site Jan_AQ spoke of.  One article in particular talks about using an available skin as a basis for creating your own.

Yes, that is the article I read a while ago. I still really like that "Boxed In" skin and hope it's available for download. I tried CSSzen but had so many problems with it, including many only in firefox, that I abandoned it and used Elegance instead. What I like about "Boxed In" is the menu in the left column instead of along the top. I have no idea how to do that and have it show up on other pages.

I kind of threw a few skins together and thought they looked oh-so-wonderful but later thought better of it. I think I'll start working on it by searching for the right graphic and looking at available skins to customize. Jan's info about the transparent white bg was very helpful. I love that effect. I have a site with great potential, so I want it to look its best. Thanks again to both of you for the help.

Thanks for the link! I did read the articles again

EDIT: I found some really great skins from Kali that I love. I'm already inspired by one of them so I I will do my best with it.

My site is back up if you want to look at the skins now. 🙂

I did replace all of my skins with variations of Kali's "edgey" skin, which is very clean and simple. I love it. At last, I have skins that I like! They're still pretty basic and I'm still messing with them, but I'm now happy.  🙂

I'm very happy to say that I've replaced my many, many html pages (basically my entire site) with a joomla install and just finally went live with it 2 days ago. Now I'm just patiently waiting on Brat, who is painstakingly constructing a joomla/efiction bridge so I can unify those sections of my site. The vast improvement of the CMS over the html pages has interested many more people already and I've seen a sudden influx of stories and new authors and members in my efiction archives. 

I'm going to add a section just for original romace authors hoping to bring in more traffic and increase the number or original stories I currently have archived. I have a few more new sections planned, like the Vampire Empire which will list plenty of "fact" and lore on vampires through history and also "Divination Through the Ages" detailing all sorts of divination devices, like crystal balls, scrying mirrors and whatnot, a section on the tarot, psychics, palm reading, famous seers, etc. This will be forthcoming as I moved only newer content and decided to start with all new stuff in my existing sections. (meaning lots of work still not done) While still featuring Harry Potter, I'm hoping to focus on spooky/dark topics with a heavy emphasis on fiction and writing.

Hope you'll take a look!

Ooh - it's shiny! I'm almost tempted to go back to Joomla.  Too bad it doesn't work with smf like I would want.
(suddenly feeling dissatisfied with my site again - haha)

Oh - by the way, I do have a couple of writing articles - but no idea if they are in the realm of what you had in mind...

Thanks so much! I am loving joomla, though it has a few irritating quirks here and there. It beats the hell out of hand constructing each and every page in html manually. Thnaks for looking and for letting me know what you thought.

On the contrary, I went to your site today and I think it looks really nice. I don;t think you should be all that dissatisfied with it. You've done a really good job.