More on the blog redesign
A little thanks, a few changes, some background, and some waxing technological.
First, thanks for all the suggestions; keep ‘em coming. I’ve taken many of them and considered all of them, all of which you should see reflected in the design now.
One thing I thought about is what people will see.
Some of you go to the home page (as would many new visitors), but many go straight to an entry, either through RSS, because of a Google search, or because of a direct link. So the individual entry pages had to act as pseudo home pages.
The real reason for the redesign is something you can’t see. The back end was a mess. There were five or six stylesheets, and I didn’t know how many of them were actually being used. There was a mix of old Movable Type entries and the newer WordPress ones, (Turns out WordPress had them all. Once I cleaned out the old MT stuff, everything switched to the new look, even the really old stuff.)
Even if there was only one stylesheet, the code was still a mess. I tweaked it so many times that some sections had two lines of code setting the font when it should have been <h3>.
So the back-end code is now cleaned up, and the pages have been simplified.
Getting a bit technical: I decided not to switch from using tables for the overall structure. I know purists think everything should be done with CSS, but frankly using tables is a lot simpler when you’re doing columns. So all the formatting is done in CSS, while the overall ’shape’ is done with a three-column table. It’s still a lot easier to work with and tweak.
Now it’s just a matter of making sure the design goes through to all the interior pages — the Contact page, for example, didn’t exist for a while. Now it does.
And that’s that. I’m sure to make more changes, but I’m vowing to keep it clean on the back end so when it’s time for the 2009 version, I’m all set.
Thanks for reading this far!
gnomic says:
Nope. I was wrong. I still see font clipping.