Supersonic Feet

Following a recent trend for 'live re-designs', I've rashly (it's 1.15am) decided to start re-designing this website in its live state.

What that means for tonight is that I've replaced the stylesheet with a super-basic one, including the reset.css and typography.css files from the Blueprint CSS framework for a quick-start on the whole vertical rhythm thing. I couldn't quite bare to quite leave it at that though, so I've quickly made sure the flickr 'badge' at least displays back up at the top of the page where it was along with the main links. Totally untested in anything but Firefox 2 for now though.

The idea (or at least part of it) is that by having your live website showing all the progress (or lack thereof) while re-designing encourages you to get a move on and get something done.

We'll see :)

At Gottabet we're looking for a 'web application designer' to join the team. The job entails a range of web dev, from helping design various sections/features of the website to implementing them in HTML and CSS.

There's a full job spec on the website, so if you're a developer who's big on web standards looking for an exciting, fast-paced job working on a big social website, check out the job spec and get in touch with Wim and Bertrand (email addresses on the linked page).

The most useful developer tool for Firefox has just hit it's first version 1.0 beta and has added some great new features.

Firebug gives you all kinds of javascript and CSS debugging tools that help you track down where errors are coming from. For example, you can inspect a single HTML element and see the CSS that's being applied to it, as well as where that CSS is coming from (filename and line number). With 1.0 beta it even shows you any CSS that would have been applied, but is getting overridden by other style definitions.

If you develop websites, you need this plugin.

Vitamin does link to some good stuff. Latest in the list is an article on Digital Web Magazine by Aaron Gustafson about the poor, neglected button form element. I have to admit I am one who'd seen the dodgy uses years ago and ended up ignoring it well before I got into standards and CSS, so the article is a mini-revelation in terms of form styling.

Basically, if you can think of an instance (and I can think of many) when you wish submit buttons weren't so bloody hard to style (or differentiate from other inputs without adding classes), read the article.

As I mentioned in my previous post, at work we're moving a lot of clients to new hosting. Due to a very silly system at the old hosts, that means we have to transfer the domain names to a new registrar as well as they won't let us just point at another host's servers. We're using 123-Reg to transfer the domains to, and today I logged in to find a new site design.

It's quite a pleasant design, but what really got me is that it still uses frames. The layout is such that frames aren't even a natural thing to use. It looks like what's happened though, is that while their front-end site has been re-designed in nice tableless code with CSS to handle presentation as should be, the back-end domain management area isn't so easy to re-code/-style. So they stuck it in a frame.

I'm hoping that is the reason and that they're working on doing the management area properly, because if they've actually chosen to use frames on a fresh build, especially with the new layout they've used, it's madness. It does (hopefully) drive home the point about writing semantic, valid code though. If the original site was written semantically, they could just write a new stylesheet and have their new design implemented much more easily and quickly (aside from any actual content/functionality changes of course).

123-Reg have made a good step forward with their new site, the main 'sales' part being mostly valid HTML, with 'skip to content' links, etc. so they (or their designers) do seem aware of the need for standards-based coding, let's just hope the job gets finished :)