New Site Design

Surprise! I’ve changed the site design (pretty significantly). I really like this design: it is set up so that at a glance you can see the most recent entry in all categories. I realize that some of you might not like the new design, but I ask that you bear with me: humor me, and you might actually end up liking it. I know I have.

Some basic information about the new site:
I have REMOVED ALL OLD FILES. They’re gone, don’t bother trying to look for them. I did back them all up, though, and over the next few weeks will be putting them in their new homes. (For instance, the image gallery currently only has the wedding album. Also, the gallery hasn’t been brought in line with the new design yet, because frankly the template “wrapper” system they use scares me a little.)

I need to mod the add-comment window.

I need to bring the links page (which is currently removed) in with the modern design.

I need to create the (now static) “articles” section, as well as the credits page.

I brought this from sketch to working test-site in two days: as such, I’ve probably missed some things. If you spot something I haven’t already listed that seems wonky, let me know. It’s been tested in: Camino, Firebird, Safari, and IE6 for Windows.

Camino and Firebird both have some (different from each other) rendering issues, but very minor ones. I’ve also noticed that now that it’s live, in Camino, the page doesn’t always reload properly. This is JUST in Camino, though: it loads clean everywhere else.

4 thoughts on “New Site Design

  1. I LOVE it! Nicely done. The look & layout are great–very intuitive, very handy. Nice graphic at the top. The navbar is nice…although something about the blue hover background and the blue page background don’t quite seem to jive with me…not that they clash. Anyhow, it’s probably nothing: I really don’t have the best eye for color (note brown website :P)

    For what it’s worth, it seems to have no rendering problems in Opera (7.22/WinXP), but when I bring it up in IE, it does display differently. I like the Opera version much better, so I’d like to think it’s what you were going for. The two minor differences:

    1- In Opera, the horizontal dividing line between blue Search box and gray box below line up with the division between mountain graphic and “Wandering Ways” black border. In IE, the gray box is much shorter.

    2- In Opera, “Powered by Movable Type” appears directly below the “Syndicate” link. In IE, “PbMT” is way at the bottom. Tough to tell which you were going for, but I’d vote Opera :)

    These are pretty minor differences, and most sites have them…typically, they point out IE’s wretched CSS support. Which, by the way, makes it all the more impressive that IE displays those columns nicely. And the site scales down nicely :)

    So my only real “change” suggestion: on the archived article (full entry) page, my eye cries out for a little left-padding on the entry…just a touch. Right now there’s not a pixel between them.

    Yet again, I’ve drifted into negative-sounding details, and I’m sorry about that: please take these as constructive suggestions for a worthy site. CSS Master! Nice work. :)

  2. Yeah, they all look slightly different, but that is to a certain extent unavoidable, considering they each even render the same font differently. I am satisfied with how they are each rendering, though, which is what counts.

    I learned from my mistakes of last time, and did all of the widths relatively… the only things thta aren’t are things that really honestly CAN’T effectively be a relative width (namely, the banner. Even there, I did a background tiling workaround so that it fills the space accordingly, though there is a minimum width of 400px for the banner overall).

    There’s nothing wrong with pointing out things that are off or wrong, I’d hardly call that being negative. You are absolutely right about the need for some padding, and I’ve just modded the templates to give some (about 5px worth). You and Mickey both commented on that, she just didn’t write it down. ;)

    The only complaint I’ve received about it is that it is “busy”. All I can say to that is “Yes.” It’s busier than it was (in either of the two previous iterations), but that was a design choice I made in deciding to treat the main page as more of a content aggregation for the rest of the site. Kind of like a splash page that is actually useful.

    Happy holidays! (Grand Haiku Master! I’ve still got all of them from work those many moons ago…)

  3. It’s a little chaotic-looking for me, but I’m sure once I get used to it I’ll like it lots. Initially, I just felt kinda… confronted by a wealth of options, and I wasn’t entirely clear what I wanted to do first, you know?

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