New design time!
Sunday, July 2nd, 2006Last time I was re-aligning but I think this time it has to count as a re-design. After feeling the urge to re-design the site a few times in recent months but never actually being able to come up with any decent ideas (why is it so much harder to design for yourself?), I’ve eventually plumped for ripping and modifiying the back-end design from the Rails content management system I’m working on.
The previous design (above) was very much on the minimal side, with no images in the design (unless you count the strip of photos from flickr), even getting listed on Design Melt Down’s Super Clean section. I’ve tried to keep the new design quite simple still, but added a little bit of graphical interest to help things along so there are now four images in the layout (background, the flickr arrow link and rounded box top and bottom).
This new design hopefully has more focus, especially with a move to fixed width (the old liquid layout didn’t always look great at high-res). The content area is cleanly defined in the white box and I think the new placement of the photos works better, especially on the black background.
While the last re-design (re-align) was done with only a very minimal change to the HTML (i.e. the stylesheet did all the work, as is the ideal), this time I have shifted it about a bit, largely to sort out the semantics. The code order now has a nice title-content-menu-footer flow, with the CSS shifting the menu back up to the top for visual placement. As such, people using screen-readers shouldn’t have to listen to a load of junk before getting to the content they’re after, although there’s a link to the menu at the top of the page incase that’s what they’re after first.
More of the site pages should actually look OK with the new design right from the off this time (I never got round to sorting some in the old design) and it seems to work just about correctly across browsers, although there’s an odd right-float-clearing problem in IE (both 6 and 7) that I’ll need to sort out. In the meantime, apologies for the post info boxes on the right not lining up properly if you’re using Internet Explorer.
While I’m on the subjct of Internet Explorer (in a round-about kind of way), last week we had our ADSL connection re-graded. We were on a 1mbps line but with ADSL MAX we were now promised 3.5mbps. Well I’ve had a week of at most downloading at 200KB/s (which is roughly 2mbps), but often all the way back down to 70KB/s and with plenty of connection failures, all of which I half-heartedly hoped was just the line settling down and BT playing with things. Until tonight, when I downloaded the Internet Explorer 7 beta 3 and noticed a silly number.
After watching the silly number for a few seconds and my download suddenly being done, it turns out I’d averaged about 450KB/s. As a vague check, I downloaded an album from emusic and got similar speeds, so I now really hope this connection keeps up at this speed (and not just at 3am!).
And finally… I’d love to hear any feedback on the new design, so please do leave (constructive) comments. I know there’ll be problems (already mentioned the right-float thing), but let me know whether you like it or not!
