September 19, 2005

A good bit of redesign

Pardon the dust on my site -- I'm in the middle of a pretty substantial redesign. Most of the pages you'll see (news, static content) look generally okay. A lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff (like the form I'm using to enter this news article) still looks like ass, but that's not as high a priority.

This has been my first large use of CSS, and since I have neither color sense nor the patience to do all this stuff from scratch, I borrowed very heavily from David Wheeler's site. His site looks great, and the last time I saw it Bricolage looked really sharp so I figure he knows what he's doing.

So for the general layout of the site I entirely ditched tables. It seems to work ok on my main three target browsers: Firefox 1, Safari and IE 6. (It's funny how 'my target browsers' and 'the browsers I have access to' coincide...) I've also been looking at losing tables for laying out forms but that seems to be a little more cutting edge than I'm comfortable with, although I think I'll modify everything to use the 'label' tag that accompanies a form input. Fortunately, the way OI2 builds up forms is semi-programmatic, so I may be able to modify one or two templates and change all the forms as a result.

More on this soon...

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