The site redesign is in.
I decided to buckle down and finish the site redesign tonight. As you can see, it’s about 90% functional (and if you can’t, clear your cache and reload, you’re probably using a cached stylesheet).
– Navigation is functioning.
– Layout is mostly functioning (in the gallery, I’m happy with the index page, less happy with the per-entry layout).
– I still need to make the links page (shouldn’t be hard, just haven’t done it yet).
– The search page still needs the new layout applied to it.. The comment section, too.
I’d appreciate feedback on the design, even if it’s just a “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” I’m going to try and finish up the last few things tomorrow sometime, so in theory the few things I’ve broken will be working again by the beginning of next week.
Hope you enjoy the redesign!
Hi, Nabil.
Can you send me a wide screen monitor? ;-|
The redesign forces me to have to scroll right to see all my options. “SITES OF INTEREST” is completely hidden on the initial panel. As you indicate, the “SEARCH” option needs some work: all I can see is “SEAR” when the initial panel is scrolled all the way to the right.
Let me ask a question that I used many a time in my prior lifetime in developing software applications: “What problem are you trying to solve such that this is the solution?”
If the goal is to acquire new skills and to practice them, that’s great. But, if the result requires additional effort by an end user to accomplish the same tasks as they did before, that’s not so great.
Keep working at it!
Dad-in-Law
8-|>>
First, let me say I really like the redesign, except for one thing.
When I saw dad-in-law’s comment, I resized my browser window, and sure enough, stuff doesn’t like to shrink past a certain point. So I scoured your stylesheet, looking for width statements, and couldn’t find any that would cause such behavior. “How can this be?” My failure made me feel, I don’t mind saying, incredibly stupid. I banged my head on my desk for a few minutes. Then I viewed the source, and found a table tag with an absolute width statement (800 px). If you change that to a relative statement, it should solve the problem. Also, I imagine that when I view the redesign at home, I’ll have a whole boatload of empty space on each side of a 800-pixel wide table.
I realize a relative width will likely cause text on your full-size image gallery pages to display under, instead of alongside, the images when viewed on smaller monitors…but I would actually think that preferable to requiring side-scrolling.
My only other nitpicky thing is the subscribe box looks a little odd. Perhaps centered would be better? That would probably still look odd. Maybe just allow the full width, or center it and go 5% below the full width, or something. I don’t have a good solution, so maybe you should just ignore that thought.
Please take no offense. Comments submitted respectfully, as always :) And visually, on a 1024+ monitor, it’s a nice improvement.
I hadn’t realized any of my viewers were still at 800×600. The site currently will NOT render properly at anything less than 1024×768. This was an intentional design choice on my part, based on the requirements of parts of the site (the gallery, in particular).
I’m going to change the width to a proportional (probably 70-80%), and then start work on version 5. I’m tempted to just gut the whole site and do something completely different.
“I’m tempted to just gut the whole site and do something completely different.”
::comf:: Don’t sweat it. I’m sure there’s a way around it that falls something short of a complete redesign. v. 4’s design is good. And it may be just a judgment call: no site looks perfect on everything. Every CSS-controlled layout looks like garbage on legacy browsers, and the increasingly popular reaction is “your browser is free, dammit: upgrade or suffer!” So maybe it’s something similar with screen resolution, and it’s no longer worth designing for sub-1024.
Just don’t want to see you get discouraged or start from scratch if you don’t need to. :)
Hi, Nabil.
It sounds like you’re getting good technical advise from Chris. I didn’t intend my comments to cause you to “gut the whole site” — just a way to identify problems that were encountered. I’m running on a five year old Compac (my wife’s backup PC) so that the different capabilities (or lack thereor) of a viewer’s equipment may not have been part of your redesign criteria.
Look upon this as a learning experience and gain from it. Another question to ask at the beginning of any project: “Who will be using the results of my work and what capabilities or limitations need to be taken into account?” You’ll probably need to ask that question when you’re off in the working world.
There are times when you may not want to design or redesign for older hardware or software used by older folks (I resemble that!) because the cost in effort or time isn’t worth it. Just keep working at modifying your site and use the experience to increase the size and capabilities of your personal “tool kit”.