The New Look

Well, I finally got around to yet another site design (the sixth in about three and a half years). So far everything seems to work, although let me know if I’ve broken something.

This design is completely table-less, instead using CSS. CSS gives a great deal more flexibility in designing layouts rather than tables, which are fixed. This also means that those of you browsing this site with less than modern browsers *cough*Netscape 4*cough* will see a mangled, but usable version of the site. Mozilla (the recommended browser for this site), Internet Explorer 6, and Safari all display the site as intended. Others may not, so if you see some bizarre formatting errors, let me know of them and I’ll see what I can do to fix them.

Web designers may notice I’ve used a number of little hacks to get things to work correctly. For instance, I couldn’t get the sidebar to extend all the way to the bottom of the page – so it doesn’t. A good section of the sidebar is in fact a background image. The design is essentially made of three DIVs, a header DIV that floats above the rest, the sidebar, and the content window. Getting all the divs to align and work on different browsers and platforms was a pain, but the results are quite cool.

This design is a deliberate step away from the usual Sekimori-style designs you see on most blogs. (Not that such designs are bad, they’re most certainly not, but I wanted to go in a different direction…) Rather than centering the page, I decided to skew it to the left. I’m also big on whitespace and allowing the entry text to stand out from the background and other elements. The other nice thing about using CSS for the design is that if I get sick of this design later in the future (and believe me, I will sooner or later) it’s much easier to change around entire design elements by simply editing the CSS file that controls everything.

This is what you should get – a page without rendering errors. IE and Safari now seem to be messing up the background colors on the PNGs… I’ll see if I can do anything about this. Some other minor formatting errors have been found and fixed.

Of course, if you want to see this site the way it was meant to be seen you could always get the right browser…

UPDATE: In about 30 seconds we have a completely new visual element to the page. The globe works in IE6 and Mozilla and Safari, and uses a nice trick of matching a DIVs background image to the header.

Man, I love CSS.