Suckerfish Dropdown page review

[ryanhellyer]

Hi all,
This isn't so much a website review as a web page review. The page in question contains my new program which generates the CSS for a Suckerfish dropdown menu.

http://ryanhellyer.net/dropdowns/

I'm keen to hear back about any bugs you might find and how difficult it is to understand what all of the various options mean. I had difficult finding words to describe some of the features of it.

Any other tips for improvements are also greatly appreciated

[BigAlReturns]

The only thing I found a bit unclear was that background image had a choice of colours, then I needed to choose a background colour as well...
I take it that the background images are patterned in some way, so it would be nice to have a preview of each one - perhaps using radio buttons next to a small sample of each option would be better than a dropdown.
The other thing I'd like to see would be some colour palette suggestions. As someone with no sense of what colours go together at all, then this would be very useful. Perhaps an option to choose some set colour schemes, then a customise option. Then when customise is selected, show the additional inputs to select custom colours.

[ryanhellyer]

Originally Posted by BigAlReturns

The only thing I found a bit unclear was that background image had a choice of colours, then I needed to choose a background colour as well...

I'll reword things so that is more clear. In a nutshell ... the background image is tiled horizontally, so if your menu is higher than the background image, then you will need to specify a background colour too. Although you will want to specify a background colour anyway simply because the menu will be unreadable until the background image is loaded or if someone has images turned off.

Originally Posted by BigAlReturns

I take it that the background images are patterned in some way, so it would be nice to have a preview of each one - perhaps using radio buttons next to a small sample of each option would be better than a dropdown.

Good thinking!

Originally Posted by BigAlReturns

The other thing I'd like to see would be some colour palette suggestions. As someone with no sense of what colours go together at all, then this would be very useful.

Yeah, that is on my list of things to do. I've seen some funky Javascripted palette generators in the past which input the HEX code directly to the form rather than you having to enter them by hand.

Originally Posted by BigAlReturns

Perhaps an option to choose some set colour schemes, then a customise option. Then when customise is selected, show the additional inputs to select custom colours.

Actually, it already has that! In the bottom left there is an option box labelled "PREMADE DESIGNS". When you choose one of those (there's only two at the moment) a whole bunch of options are changed all at once.

I'll try to make that more clear though as you obviously didn't see it/understand what it was for.


Thanks for the input

[ryanhellyer]

I've now added a palette program, which allows you to click a link which pops up a small palette which you can choose your colour from.


I've also added some more options in the Premade Designs selection box.

[BigAlReturns]

Like the palette addition, good touch.
One small problem I found - you don't accept 000000 as a valid hex code.

A suggestion as well, although it might take a fair bit of work - you could use javascript to automatically update the menu on the page as each option is changed, saving submitting to see how each change would look. It would be pretty simple, although maybe a little time consuming to do it for each option! You could also quite easily have the actual CSS update via javascript as well, just leaving the button there for people who have JS disabled.

[ryanhellyer]

I think I know where the 000000 bug is coming from and should be able to fix that. Thanks for noticing it though as I didn't realise that was happening.

I COULD use Javascript to automatically update the menu, but that would require putting my source code on the page which I would rather not do as AFAIK this is the only Suckerfish CSS generating page on the net - or at least I couldn't find one with Google anyway.

Some Ajax to grab the new style information from the server would be a nice touch, but unfortunately that is beyond my meagre programming knowledge at this stage. I may do something like that at a later date but I'll need to learn some basic Javascript first.

[BigAlReturns]

I can understand your concerns about publicising source code, might be able to help you out with the Ajax part. I have an article I wrote a while ago on an introduction to ajax - if you have a google account then PM me with it and I'll share it over Google Docs.