Web Page Design

Hey all, I assume at least some of you remember my Diablo 2 Collection website that died. Well i'm rebuilding it at the moment and giving it a bit of a make over. Anyway i've added custom cursors, which are working fine except for one little quirk. Just as you move the cursor over a link, where the transition between diff cursor pix is, I get the default windows cursor slipping in to haunt me. Does anybody know how to make the damn thing go away? Here's the code I used if it helps.

body {
font: 20px Avalon Quest, Exocet Light, Comic Sans Ms, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
color: #FF9900;
cursor: url(stuff/diablo.cur);
}
a:hover {
text-decoration: none;
color: #ff0000;
cursor: url(stuff/diablo2.cur);
}

add one in for the normal state of a im guessin

like in ya css add

a {
cursor: url(stuff/diablo2.cur);
}

that would nearly do it u'd think...

Nice one dude.

I've been using tables for my page layout, but I always get this blank bit right at the top of the page. Any ideas?

marginheight marginwidth and a
LEFTMARGIN="0" TOPMARGIN="0" MARGINWIDTH="0" MARGINHEIGHT="0"

in body tag of document

The Leftmargin and Topmargin did the trick.
Chalk another one up to the little guy.

I've got a menu down the side of the site. How would I get it to follow me as I scroll down the page?

either use frames so it stays there or use a little java script

Frames! *wards off evil spirits*

I don't know what script to use. I'm new at this scripting thing

Hey, a single frame ain't that bad, as long as you make it blend in with the rest of the site. :)

if u want the menu to stick use a frame - scripts always break

frames are ideal for the purpose of a separated menu so long as u dont go nuts with em :D

Thank you. :P

there are alot of downfalls to using frames tho - i just think if its a choice b/n frames/script - use a frame

google for "website using frames bad example" and hit the first few pages for info on whats bad about frames

heres a good example of bad : http://stgtech.com/staff/gcallah/BadHTML/bad1.html

going through those pages reminded me of another site.. http://members.fortunecity.com/cycophil/menu.html :D

Gee...thanks Beefy. :P
Big meany.
I think I did pretty well considering I learnt HTML from scratch and only used Notepad to make it (shows, doesn't it). It's my pointless little corner of the Web and I'll thank you not to stare....

Hehe.. sorry, I had to throw that in. Not bad for a notepad job, but if you look through sks's link, you'll see what I was talking about..

Mine was also done in notepad, hooray for notepad!!!!

pfft sif notepad hand code using a macro'd editor makes more sense than any, homesite am winnar! but i use phpedit now coz it pwns for both html and php editing..

dreamweaver for layout/design idea testing, then to phpedit for further code cleaning/tweaking. dont see the point in "re-inventing the wheel" with doing everything in notepad

I wanted to learn html, and coding it by hand seemed a good way to do it. Dreamweaver is fine if you like spending 50% of your time undoing all the stuff it "helpfully" does for you.

Dreamweaver is great. I can't say I undo anything I didn't mean to happen...

like anything a powerful tool is only as good as the person using it :D take flash for example

dreamweaver compared to ms frontpage... well theres no competition there... but if dw did do somethin in the code it shouldnt have - atleast u can find it, unlike frontpage and other crap editors, it has neat code layout with proper nesting/tabbing!

Remember that cursor you gave me code for? Worked like a charm, until I uploaded it. Everytime you hover on links it seems to actually pause and download the damn cursor. Anyway I can get it to preload or cache it?

yes, you can.

Marvelous! And how would I go about doing that then?

PHPedit is teh rorxiest prog evar!

Marvelous! And how would I go about doing that then?
Well, a simple google for 'preload images script' got me this: http://javascriptkit.com/script/script2/preloadimage.shtml

That doesn't appear to have made any difference. Could that be because the code is designed for images?

isn't the cursor an image?

it's an animated cursor, so it's either a .ani or .cur file. We had a chat about it last night. Doesn't seem like there's anyway to actually preload it. :(

I never said it was an animated cursor. I said it had the extension .cur which means it can't be animated, they end in .ani

my bad

...yes...

just don't use a custom cursor would be the easiest solution.. no lag then :D

I think Rimmer from Red Dwarf said it best:
"I think we all have something to bring to this discussion, and I think the thing you should bring is silence"

you underestimate the power of notepad.... as long as you have a couple of graphical programs to back it up... it should be all good

Instead of your custom cursor you could have something like this in a CSS file.

a {
color : #eeb341;
background-color: inherit;
text-decoration : none;
cursor : pointer;
}

Im not sure if you can add your own in there but something to follow up on.

I have used the a tag in my CSS to change the cursor already