I’ve finally put the finishing touches to the site redesign and pushed it live. The old design looked quite nice but it got a bit wide on large resolutions (anything from 1024×768 upwards really) so a lot of paragraphs consisted of one or two lines and were getting a bit difficult to read. The site now uses a fixed-width layout which seems a lot better to me.
I’ve tried to improve the navigation by putting only the major links at the top of the page and all the others in the sidebar. You can also see my “friends list” which links directly to the blogs of people I know (if you know me, have a blog and aren’t listed, drop me a line and I’ll add you). Another minor change is that entry titles link to the entry in question now, which should make it easier to get to stuff.
If you’re wondering where the CSS came from, I originally downloaded the front page of A List Apart to see how they’d got their 2 column layout to work across a wide range of browsers and platforms. There was a lot of box model hacking and other tricks in there, which I ripped out, and some other CSS which wasn’t relevant to my site so went straight to /dev/null as well. I then re-arranged and edited the remaining code, constantly weeding out the unnecessary parts and substituting in my colour schemes until I had it working the way I wanted.
If you notice anything that’s broken, please let me know and I’ll fix it if possible. However if something is broken in Internet Explorer I strongly recommend that you try out Firefox or another standards-compliant browser because IE doesn’t always get things right.
Looks very nice! (although i got quite a scare when safari cached the old css and it all went horribly wrong :))
(tip to safari uses, its alt-refresh to get it to force a proper refresh)
oh, hmm the comments thing on the front page looks a bit crap? (wraps onto new line and doesn’t look good)
I know the comment thing wraps, I’ve put it in a slightly smaller font size but it still goes over one line. It’s annoying but I don’t think there’s much I can do about it. I guess I could take out the day things were posted but I think it’s nice to be able to have it say “Saturday” instead of seeing “29th January” and then trying to work out when that was.
yeah some different date format possibly?
Not sure exactly what else I could use as the date format though. The day needs to be there, although I suppose I could use the short (i.e. three letter) versions of day and month instead. I think I’ll give that a whirl later.
It’s too thin—that’s the problem with my site too. I’d make it about half as wide again and see what it looks like. Also, fancy making this comment box a bit bigger?
In fact… while I’m on the topic… there was something else too. Ah, well. Maybe it will come back to me.
Ah, yes. I remember—if I enter http://www.lewiz.org in the homepage box the link doesn’t work out. Maybe you could wrap that so it prepends http:// if it isn’t already there?
I did think about making it a bit bigger, at the moment it’s 600 pixels wide so it should fit into any browser. Then again I guess everyone is using 800×600 nowadays, or at least they should be really.
The reason the comment box is small is because if I make it any bigger it overlaps the right column and breaks the design. If I make the whole thing bigger I will increase the size of the comment box too.
As for the http:// issue, it’s something I’m aware of and will try and fix today.
Ok, I’ve increased the overall width of the page by 100 pixels and added extra columns to the textarea for comments so it looks a bit better now. Anyone using a resolution less than 800×600 is going to have to scroll horizontally though. Ah well.
I think I’ve fixed the http:// issue as well, just testing it now.
Edit: If you just write http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com, the code should automatically fix it. Let me know if it doesn’t, I’m just going to fix all the existing comments manually.
It looks better but to be honest I preferred it as it was. The new footer/column are nice and so is the cut-down link bar at the top 🙂
Comment thing looks much better.