Well, I did a bunch of coding tonight, and have v1 of my site redesign up and ready to beta-test.
More details on the redesign are in the rest of this post. Unfortunately, as all I’ve re-coded so far is the main Long Letter page, they’ll revert to the current design. Still, at least I’m started, right?
I’ve made a bunch of changes both to the visual look of the page, and to the underlying code that puts it all together. Hopefully these are all for the better!
The biggest similarity between the two designs is the basic layout — primary content on the left, links and secondary content on the right. I’ve also kept the content itself pretty much identical — everything that was in the right hand column in the old layout is also there in the new.
Visually, aside from the colorscheme, there are really only a few changes. I’ve increased the base font size in the main content area, so my posts should be a bit easier to read now. They’ll look longer, of course — but it’s the same amount of random babble. I also changed the way I coded the font — rather than setting the initial size at a fixed point size, it now uses the default size set in the user’s browser. So, for instance, if a visitor has their default font size for their browser set a little bit larger for easier reading, my site will use that rather than picking its own, possibly too tiny size. Lastly, the main content column no longer flows underneath the right-hand column when it extends below the bottom edge — rather, it stays in its own column, leaving whitespace underneath the right side.
On a code level, however, there have been a lot of changes. I’m using far fewer font tags to alter the appearance of text depending on context or placement in favor of more accurately defining stylesheet rules. This allows me to use less extraneous markup in my HTML code — which should make translating my page to new stylesheets easier than it was this time.
Another major change that the majority of visitors won’t see — but might come in handy for a select few — is a rearrangement of the order that sections are coded into the code. Previously, my lists of links had to come prior to the main body text, otherwise they wouldn’t appear in the correct place on the page. With my new stylesheet, I’m able to do the reverse, and code the content before the links. What’s the big deal? Well, for most people, it doesn’t matter — half of one and six dozen of the other. However, if someone was using an old broswer that couldn’t interpret the CSS code correctly — and therefore just tossed the text onto the screen, without any fancy layout — they’d have to scroll through page after page of links before they ever saw any content — and would likely leave before reading anything. Similarly, if someone was using an ‘aural browser’ (designed for blind or nearly-blind users, these browsers can read a page aloud), they’d have to sit and listen to a few minutes of link after link after link before they hit content. Now, no matter what kind of browser is used to check my pages, content has priority. Definitely a plus.
So — what do you think? Comment away….