It’s time to announce yet another minor design change to the site. This time I’m talking about the Videos page, which seemed suitable at first, but then I realised that loading 31 YouTube videos at once really puts a strain on computers. What I’ve got in mind is a set of sub-pages, with five episodes each. However, here’s your chance to say what you think about how it should be. Vote in this little poll and tell me how you’d like the videos page to be structured.
It looks like we have a clear winner there! I’ll get the page set up and running more smoothly as soon as possible.
Something’s bugging me with the navigation bar. It doesn’t show up in IE6 or 7. At all. As in, it’s totally invisible. I don’t want to have to stop supporting IE and flashing alerts in peoples’ faces, but I don’t know how to fix it.
So I need some help. If anyone reading this has any idea how to fix this problem, shout about it in the comments and I’ll get in touch with how you can help.
Please, just do me this one favour. I’ll never ask for anything ever again. Hopefully.
Some of you may have noticed the small flaws in the site design such as the sidebar not displaying properly in Firefox or the navigation bar stacking up on itself if the window was too small.
After a whole afternoon of coding, I’ve solved all those little problems and everything should be running and displaying properly. I also added some small things such as the site being centred in the browser. Finally, I changed the font of the post titles and sidebar text from Orator Std (a Mac font) to Courier (a Mac and Windows standard font). This was because of two reasons; first, only Mac users could see it – Windows machines had to default to a different font anyway – and second, a little bird told me that the all-caps thing looked a bit strange.
So enjoy the new look, and leave any thoughts in the comments!
So this is the final theme (for now) of the site. I went for a kind of futuristic/space age look, using the blues and greys. You’ll notice that links are blue and an underline appears when you hover over them. Let me know what you think of the new theme in the comments, everything is still easily changeable. Look out for more frequent posts, too – I’m trying to change my ways!
It’s full steam ahead with the redesign still. I’m working steadily down the page, so now that the header and the favicon are done, I’ve been working on a navigation bar to sit at the top of each page. After much, much struggling with the CSS, two complete re-writes of the code and about 12 different GIF designs, I’ve finished it, and personally, I think it looks kind of good.
That’s not the best part, either; the reason it took so much redesigning and coding is because I was adding rollover effects to each of the buttons. See those little white dots? Watch what they do when you hover your cursor over the button they belong to:
The way it works is using the CSS ’sprites’ technique. I won’t go into it here, because there are loads of places where you can learn about it. Basically, it involves setting up the original image and the rollover image into one document and then using the background-position function in CSS to display the second one on rollover.
I won’t keep you any longer, I have some coding or something to do (it’s the sidebar next). See you next time for another installment of How I’m Doing With The New Site!
While I’m sorting out the new (and improved) theme for the site, I thought I’d add in a tiny change to the current one; it’s something that is quite helpful as there are no homepage links on the individual pages. Well, now the header image is clickable, and it links to the homepage. It’s a small thing, but I think it makes quite a difference.
If you’re a blogger on Wordpress and you’d like to learn how to do this on your custom themes, click here.
So design of the new theme continues. Topic of the moment: the favicon, the little graphic you see in the address bar and bookmarks of browsers. You might say it doesn’t matter because it’s only a 16×16 image that no one really looks at. But I think it does. If you’re looking down your bookmarks list and all you see are globe icons (Safari) or white page icons (IE and Firefox), then not only does it make the bookmarks list boring, but also I find that if I’m looking for a certain site, I’ll look for their logo in the list. So I made one for my site.
If you’re using MAMP to design or edit a website offline, on your Mac, then I have a tip for you. If you know (or suspect) that there are people out there who will view your site on an iPhone or iPod touch, you’re going to want to know what they’ll see when they load your page. Because you can’t open the localhost site on anything other than the Mac, you won’t be able to use a real iPhone. But there is a way! If you haven’t already, download XCode from Apple, which is free and comes with the iPhone Simulator. Fire up the Simulator and launch fake Mobile Safari. Then type the address of your offline site into the address bar, and lo and behold, there’s the site you’re working on, as if you were using an iPhone!
If you’re wondering how this works, I’m not sure, but I think it’s something to do with the Simulator being able to access everything on your computer, including the internet type things. Don’t hold me to that, though.
Welcome to my new Wordpress blog, hosted on my very own site! I offer thanks to UrbanGiraffe, who provided the PDF I needed to get designed and ready to upload. I’m still working – this current design is temporary – and I’ll be blogging about the process. Hopefully I’ll be making a corkboard theme. That is, the posts will be posted on a corkboard background. Check back soon to see the progress I’ve made. Oh, and feel free to comment with any tips, questions etc. See you soon!
