Fish Profiles

Intro

God... headings, this must a long post.  Yeah, I know what you're thinking.

The points I will raise here are intended to be positive and constructive, if they do not come across as such, it's my lack of talent with written English that is to blame.  I have no intention of upsetting anyone or of treading upon anyone's toes.  If I do upset anyone, my apologies in advance.

In the old forum, this section was a general questions or suggestions area for the website, I guess mostly aimed at you Peter.  Forgive me if that is unwanted this time around, but...

Fish Profiles

I have included this first because this display, or something very similar was used in the old Community Creator and possibly the new one too.  There are a number of points I would like to raise about this part of the site.

• Numbers without units.  OK, some of these are obvious...ish;  Size: 7 means Size: 7cm... probably;  Min Temperature: 24 means Min Temperature: 24C.  But Min Tank Size: 120, is this cm or litres or something else?  Sociability: 7 (out of 10?) and what on earth is Aquarium Suitability measured in.  Actually, whatever it's measured in the data itself would seem suspect, both Red-Tailed Catfish and Salt & Pepper Corydora's have an Aquarium Suitability of 3 (out of 5?)  That can't be right can it?
• I personally would prefer something like Temperature 22-24C, but that's a personal thing.  Stock Size is probably an internal CC field and I don't feel it should displayed, same thing for "Max Number: 0"  It's a bit weird seeing it along with "Min Number: 4" (By the way, "Goldfish" have "Min. Number: 0" and "Max. Number: 0";  If this means something special, it escapes me)
• Aquarium Requirements.  I find this section 'Scatty'.  It would profit greatly by being a table, lining up the name and the values in two columns, it would be much easier to scan, but I realise there isn't room to do that.  The easiest quick-fix for this would be to right-align the values for each of the entries.  They would be far easier to scan through that way.

Main Page

• Speaking of sub-menus;  It would look better if all the menu boxes were only as wide as their contents like "Gallery" or if they are all a fixed width like "Info".
• The dynamic nature of the main menu for Fish Profiles makes selecting "Others" pretty tricky;  You have to navigate your mouse within the sub-menu to the blank space at the end and carefully move it down and across!  The following changes in index.css will fix that and put all the sub-items on one line: (You could move the species popup down to accommodate the two line sub-menu, but that raises other problems)

#dropList ul#menu div.col3 {
    width: 440px;  /*make the menu box wider */
}
#dropList ul.atoz {
    background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #FFFFFF;
    height: 24px;
    list-style: none outside none;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    width: 100%; /* fill the menu box with the items */
}Note for future.  Using px as a size is not a good idea.  It is too dependent upon screen size.  The better way is to use em, this relates the size to the default font-size.  But I am not for a minute suggesting you go around altering it, it would be too much effort.

Content

In the past, the contents of this site, apart from the forum, have been pretty static.  This has been due, I think, to your desire to not be involved on any sort of regular basis.  I have no issue with this, it's your site, you can be as involved or as uninvolved as you wish; [creep] Although you seem to be knowledgeable, even allowing for your history in retail , and your involvement would be an asset [/creep]

You seem to be more involved now, but it's a new site and given your desire to start up ThinkDog, ThinkCat, ThinkRabbit and ThinkSnake I feel, sadly, that this won't last indefinitely.

I would like to suggest that you allow us, the community, to submit articles and fish profiles for the site.  I don't have a firm idea how this could be done, but an initial idea might be to set up areas in the forum where we could post articles and profiles for submission;  The forum users would suggest changes and discuss the suitability of the item and finally using the facilities of the forum software submit it to a community vote.  If it passes, the profile or article would be submitted to you, who would have the final say obviously.  This would keep the involvement required of you to a minimum.

I know that there are items that could be included;  Sue's articles on cycling for example, and I have some articles on lighting I have been dying to write.

Some good points and suggestions - I will formulate a proper response when I get a bit more time over the next few days
In the meantime I have spent the best part of today tidying up the fish profiles. Still got a few extra bits to do but have at least sorted out the units and got rid of any non-sensical stats 

to be fair to Peter, there is already an article up on cycling tanks which mentions both fishless and fish-in cycling

There is indeed, but they are complementary;  Peter's gives an introduction to cycling and the cycling methods available, Sue's guides are detailed step by step instructions on HOW to cycle a tank.

I never intended the examples to be critical, they were, after all, examples.  It was to point out that, perhaps, the articles could be a valuable addition to the site.  Another pitfall may be that Sue has no desire for her articles to be included more formally, I have not discussed this matter with her.

i have no idea how easy this would be to do but maybe a link could be included in Peter's article to Sue's entrys in the forum... that could be another way to do it