Emily says:

I think your use of style sheets makes for a far more visually pleasing site. The pages might even be a little easier to read.

So now when you brag about your hand coded pages, people won’t say “yeah, we noticed”.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, I vote you keep it up.

Andrew says:

Thank you! I’m glad it wasn’t just a change for the sake of change.

The big difference, I think, is my use of a slightly larger and sans-serif font for the body copy. Like a lot of people, I always thought that serif fonts were better for body text, but every article I read on Web design says that’s only true for print.

So I switched to Verdana for the body (it’s similar to Arial and Helvetica, but was designed specifically for the Web) and upped the size a bit. With space not being an issue, I figure the larger font will be easier for everyone.

Then I did little things like change the logo and get rid of the entire left-hand navigation pane. I only have a handful of nav links, so why waste a whole column?

And now that my father is finally using either Firefox or IE 6, I can use CSS to structure everything.

[whew] Not everything has moved over yet, but I’m getting there. Some of the non-blog things that I coded individually have yet to be done, but that’s happening in bits and pieces.

Emily says:

Ah, I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the feeling was definitely there. I have wondered what makes some fonts more readible than others. The obvious lack of curlicues and doodads is not the whole explanation. I wonder how the computer screen differs from the printed page in this example?

Thanks for going into the topic a little deeper. And good luck on the move. I’m sure it’s lots of work.