Coming soon to a Blog near you!
I'm going to implement the new stylesheet I developed for the blog, a few months back, soon. If you want to take a look at it again, it's available here.
Now, I don't want to be a design Nazi, but I'm going for a more professional look, and I'm not going to entertain any "fruit salad" feedback. If there are any functional elements that are out of whack, I'm all ears. (With recent accessability issues in CSS implementation that I've learned about, I'll be changing all the sizing to "em" units, so that's been taken into account, already)
I will develop alternative stylesheets in the future, that could perhaps incorporate more color... but I've gotten some pretty good feedback from "people in the know," so I think this is a step in the right direction.
That is all.
posted by gcolbath @ 12:46 PM
13 Comments:
The one thing I'd mention is that Metafilter is a worthy link, besides that, I'm getting used to the new style, but I like it.
I like the layout. I'm still a fan of color, but perhaps we can post a photo now and again to 'spruce things up' a bit? We could do our own version of Sullivan's View from Your Window!
I like the "professional" look but do agree that maybe a small and conservative amount of color would help. Also, I know you are working on it, but the huge gap on the first post of every page is a serious probelm. As we know from our pie charts (I like pumpkin the best!) you lose over half your readers by the time you get below the "crease" and the gap currently causes there to be no post content above the crease.
Soc is right - the "above the fold" crease is really disconcerting.
As for color, because I know that was the point of this whole post, I have a few ideas.
1. Tie the background color to the background color on http://favcol.com/. That way, you'll always have the carrot-cake of backgrounds. A.K.A. something no one will like but that no one uproariously objects to either.
2. Keep it drab and grey, because that best describes us and our commentary. (not reccomended)
3. Make it orange. I like orange, and the benefits of my preference would easily drown out any complaints from fellow optimates. For me.
4. Offer a small range of color schematics, a la the page layouts on www.mugglenet.com or www.onemorelevel.com. I don't know much of anything about web design, so I have no idea of what kind of rectal pain this would cause, but I've seen it a lot of places, so I'm guessing it isn't extraodinarily difficult. That way people could say, Hmmm, not digging the pink, but maybe if it were blue, or black, or green, or... Orange! That's it! I dunno, this is all aesthetic, ubt websites should be considered similarly to magazine lay-outs, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm sure there are a lot of inquisitive people who aren't drawn to The New Republic simply because it's design isn't engaging enough. This one will be, once there's a little color. Keep the link space the same, as it's neutrality will work with just about any background color the user might select, and won't cause any type color issues, and I think we're set.
Otherwise go with orange. Then you can't lose. With me.
Hey. I LIKE carrot cake! A lot. Especially the frosting. Mmm... Is there some way we can make a downloadable version of that frosting and put it on the site?
Ok, I think a LITTLE color might be good—but ridiculous amounts of background color is not going to really solve anything. There are many ways to incorporate color that won't distract the reader from the actual content of the site. I will look into alternate ideas soon.
More concerning, I'll agree, is the gap that's occuring in the first entry. I cannot see what is casuing this from anything I've seen in the Blogger script, CSS, or JavaScript. None of the changes I have made are having any logical inpact on the structure of the page—and everything appears fine on Internet Explorer. So, best I can figure, there's some sort of tweak that's being implememnted to IE's benefit, that's casuing the layout to be screwed up in Firefox, et al. I have no idea what this may be. I can see that blogger is inserting a <div> tag with style="clear: both;". I have no idea why they are doing this, but it may have something to do with the visual descrepancy. I also cannot find a way to prevent this from happening, as it is something that comes purely from Blogger's end, and I have no control over it.
I have contacted Blogger support, and am awaiting response from them.
Until then, I ask that we all hang in there... when I have more time I can try and troubleshoot this as best I can... else I get a response from Blogger support, and they can clue me in on some proprietary fix.
Well, this just goes to show ya... there's a time and place for everything. Turns out that the solution to the "above the crease" issue was to use absolute positioning for the sidebar element, thus removing it from the "flow" of the page. I'm not sure if anyone noticed, but the posts were appearing roughtly 2em below the sidebar. This was because of the <div style="clear:both"></div> that blogger was inserting above and below the body of each post. because I was positioning everything relative to each other, those <div> tags were making it so they "cleared" the sidebar. Ugh.
Unfortunately, this is the *CORRECT* behavior for CSS-driven pages, and the fact that it was displaying ok in IE is only further testimonial that they do not support CSS properly. When testing the page with the correct CSS in IE, it was all wonkey. So, thankfully there exists a way of stating IE specific styles, that only IE can see, using a syntax for conditionals that apply only to the inferior browser. With this, I was able to pass the "questionable" CSS to IE, so that it will look correct, there.
I had run into too many problems with absolute positioning in the past, so I started learning newer, more flexible ways of positioning elements with CSS, but like I said: certain things need to be applied in certain ways—there is no good and bad CSS... just certain times to use one method, certain times to use another, and times to use both in perfect code harmony.
So. Yeah.
I'm off to try and teach myself ActionScript.
That is all.
Looks way better!
I love the color! Also: thank you for adding the roange text. It keeps my eyes from wandering off to look at pretty birds outside my window!
I'm interested to know, what each of you are using for monitors, and what color the background appears to be on each.
I thought I picked a nice very light blue as per the display on my laptop (lcd screen), but it appears to be a light lavender on a "regular" monitor (crt screen).
Any responses will be appreciated.
That is all.
My CRT shows it as light lavender, but it's nice, unobtrusive, and still alows for some palette, so I'm a fan.
I like the clouds. They are nice and fluffy.
Greets to the webmaster of this wonderful site! Keep up the good work. Thanks.
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