From the Orient

A redesign then. Got bored with the last one and decided to go back to the basics one.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find my original CSS file. Luckily, “PapaScott”:http://www.papascott.de/ is still using my design, so I stole it back.

A few minor mods, and here we are. At the same time, I made my MT set up “cruft free”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/08/15/slugs

Before this entry would have had a URL of

http://www.dellah.com/orient/2003/09/30/grand_designs_wars_sos_from_hell.shtml

now it is just

http://www.dellah.com/orient/2003/09/30/design

p.s. “Hello Princess”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/eastenders/

Today has been so utterly dull and depressing and has already gone of for far to long because the kids woke us up at 5am. At 6am I was redesigning this website whilst little children climbed all over me. The results were less than impressive, especially when Emilia type into my CSS file whilst I got my 2nd coffee of the morning. The results were interesting.

Then I cycled to work, and it was very nice.

This is the canal I cycle along as it looked this morning :-

And here are some nice inhabitants of the canal :-

The canal is called the Kennet and Avon and has a lock on it called Blake’s Lock. Shrug.

Oddly enough, a few hours later, Aquarion “was at a different stretch of the canal”:http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2003/06/13/Down_by_the_canal, having a much nicer time than me; as being eaten alive by red ants is much better than my job. Crappity crap.

So, this afternoon I finished off the redesign. I rapidly disliked the Star Trek theme.

I’ve modified the colours for the links after Dorothea correctly pointed out they were a bit dim. Whilst I was at it, I took the opportunity to do some more styling. If you have a “mozilla”:http://www.mozilla.org based browser, you’ll see it as I want it to be, but it still looks okay in other browsers (Anyone on a Mac, please tell me otherwise).

I think it looks pretty nice, and it comes from virtually the same XHTML as the very “basic design”:http://www.dellah.com/orient/2003/01/31/clean_slate.shtml I did a while ago. That’s quite some power CSS brings you.

Speaking of CSS, check out the “CSS Zen Garden”:http://www.mezzoblue.com/zengarden/ Hopefully the start of the next step in CSS design as _real_ web designers take control of CSS instead of us, rather more functional designers.

In the adverts during tonights Buffy and Angel, I managed to do some modification to the design. (see another reason not to get TiVo)

The trouble is things have gotten a little messy after I installed Threaded Comments; remember I said I wanted every _feature_ in place before starting the redesign because it leads to an unnatural bolt-on feel. I feel the structure in the comments isn’t right, and there were a number of display issues in Internet Explorer.

Tonight, I fixed the display issues, and made the page a little more cleaner by removing/moving much of the metadata. However, under the surface things look messy. Without looking, you can’t see it, but I know its there. Anyway, the CSS files has quadrupled in size as a result of these changes. I’ll have to see what I can do about that.

It is only in use that you can find all the faults in a system that you didn’t think about. I’ve left the design alone for a week or so, and have identified a number of things that need changing. Small things, that you couldn’t identify without seeing it in action. Also, I really like the design of the comments form from Antipixel [via Plasticbag] so will be incorporating that. Finally, it seems that the posting of comments here is very slow. Don’t know why, but myabe related to the SimpleComments plugin. Investigating.

PapaScott calls my CSS cleanup campaign, an Undesign. Check it out. I think his site looks rather good
One thing though, I hadn’t actually finished my redesign. Compared to Aquarion, my redesigns advance like glaciers.