Need help with my first real website

Hey everyone,

Glad to see the forum section back up and running. I have been working on a website for my mother-in-law for the past few weeks. I would love to hear feedback on it. I also have a few issues with the site ( I have included notes in the html). I’m not sure if some of them are caused by Codepen like a display error on their end or if I’m missing something. Any and all help/feedback is greatly appreciated.

Link to the Codepen: https://codepen.io/JBuddie/live/PoPvVLz

Thanks all!

Edit: Before someone points it out, yes the third review is a Marc Anthony song lol, just needed to fill it for now.

Nice just on your first website. I like debugging and looking at other people’s code (it helps me reinforce what I’ve learned), so I’m going to try to help you with your issues.
Sorry for the potentially long post

  • Testimonials
    • there are multiple ways to prevent the title from breaking. The simplest is to adjust the font size
    • the color change on the buttons is caused by your a:hover {} declaration. The button
    • why are you using display: grid & display: flex in this section?
  • Contact
    • There are errors in your CSS which are preventing the background color from being shown. Once I corrected your errors I saw that the color matched the About section.
    • Why is this in your CSS #contactinfo{margin-left: 70vw;}? If my understanding is that you want your Contact section to be split into two equal pieces you need to remove this.
      Other things I noticed.
  • Your image in your header has a white background so it’s hiding some of your border.
  • I would center each of your sections vertically and horizontally.
  • You have some extra HTML at the bottom of your Contact section. Maybe it’s just a placeholder?
  • Don’t forget to validate your CSS and HTML with the tool that checks it. There are a few errors that need to be corrected.
  • Your images are OK, but there is some distortion when the browser is not on full screen on a desktop.
  • There are spacing issues, but I think they wll be resolved once you center your elements and adjust the font sizes.
  • #video {max-width: 45vw;} leaves a funny gap on the right side of that container.

Just a tip…next time you design a site try to build it for a phone first, then scale it up for other devices. It will be a lot easier to manage.
Also, to help you debug your CSS, some times it’s helpful to temporarily add background colors to each element so you can check the spacing and see what’s going on.

Hopefully I’ve helped you get on the right track again

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@JohnJohn,

Thanks for taking a look and the help!

I’ll try to address everything as neatly as possible.

Testimonials
there are multiple ways to prevent the title from breaking. The simplest is to adjust the font size

why are you using display: grid & display: flex in this section?

the color change on the buttons is caused by your a:hover {} declaration.

-So yes resizing the title fixed that, as far as the reasoning behind using both flex and grid, it’s what seems to be working to be honest. The flex is keeping the reviews scroller centered. Without, it is more to the right.

Good eye on the hover, I didn’t realize it was not specifically for the navbar. I made another one for the buttons here as well.

Contact
There are errors in your CSS which are preventing the background color from being shown. Once I corrected your errors I saw that the color matched the About section.

Why is this in your CSS #contactinfo{margin-left: 70vw;}? If my understanding is that you want your Contact section to be split into two equal pieces you need to remove this.

-I have #contactinfo{margin-left: 70vw;} in there because I am having a problem with the formatting of that entire section. It probably has something to do with the errors you found. I’m hoping that fixing those errors with make that unneccesary.

  • As far as the errors you saw and corrected, I did not see those in the post, would you be able to point out what you saw?
* * Other things I noticed.
* Your image in your header has a white background so it’s hiding some of your border.
* I would center each of your sections vertically and horizontally.
* You have some extra HTML at the bottom of your Contact section. Maybe it’s just a placeholder?

-I noticed the logo image doing that as well and I left it because I liked it and couldn’t figure out how to get my border to do that on it’s own.

-I will look into centering the sections vertically and horizontally.

  • If you are referencing the random letters in the ‘p’ then yes it it just holding a place while I tried to figure out the formatting down there.
* Don’t forget to validate your CSS and HTML with the tool that checks it. There are a few errors that need to be corrected.
* Your images are OK, but there is some distortion when the browser is not on full screen on a desktop.
* There are spacing issues, but I think they wll be resolved once you center your elements and adjust the font sizes.
* `#video {max-width: 45vw;}`  leaves a funny gap on the right side of that container.

-I’ll check out the validation tool as well.

-I’m not seeing the gap you speak of, at least on my end.

So, I think my biggest thing now is trying to get this thing good for a phone. Do I need to redo the whole site or is it as simple as a meta tag, I’m just kind of confused as to how to do that part. (might of bitten off more than I could chew lol). I tried putting a meta tag which I googled, and when I open the site on my phone it was still all messed up. Will the centering help fix this?

I also did assign background colors to mark the individual section boundaries to start, I must have done too much and couldn’t figure out where I went wrong in messing up the Contact section.

Thanks so much for the help so far btw!

I’ve changed the background color of container2 to blue so you can see what’s going on with the video’s spacing on the right.

You can see the errors in your code by selecting the dropdown arrows in each section in CodePen and choosing “Analyze…” You will need to scroll through your code and look for a red line with the error message.

I would recommend fixing the desktop site first before moving onto the mobile friendly site (with media queries not in <meta>) because to create a mobile friendly site you might be moving around elements and it would be best to have them figured out before trying to change them view media queries. Here is more info on media queries --> https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_media_query_breakpoints.asp

Also, check out this site if you need help with centering --> https://css-tricks.com/centering-css-complete-guide/

I don’t think you need to start from scratch again. You should be able to debug the site and improve it from this point. If you find yourself still struggling just update your Pen and post in the forum again and we will help you.

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