More Design Changes
The weather hasn’t been great this weekend so rather than go for a wander over the moors I’ve stayed in — accompanied by a little Beethoven and Bronski Beat — and tweaked the design a little. Welcome then to design 2007-2.4.
So what’s changed? Quite a lot actually but mostly under the bonnet. I have completely rewritten the HTML and as the different colours for each collection were making the stylesheet a little bulky I have replaced a significant number of duplicate entries with a handy PHP function. I’ve also split my stylesheets up into type, forms, and layout and recombined them again with PHP.
The last thing I’ve done in PHP is use it to calculate the line-heights, padding, and margins with and without borders to convert my chosen pixel values to ems. I can now change the font size and the baseline rhythm centrally very easily. That one was just for fun more than anything else.
My only concern with these changes is that it might slow down the loading time for each individual page as a result of a new stylesheet being served for each request and not cached but it seems fine thus far.
Front End Changes
I have removed the pseudo drop down menu that I had. It was a nice idea but I tired of it quickly.
I have also addressed one of the biggest problems I had with this design by adding some additional navigation at the bottom to move between posts. I think it fits much better now and feels more natural. This was inspired by Steve being inspired by Andy Rutledge, hence the large ‘Now?’.
I won’t go into detail about the rest of the changes; I think it is more fun to find things, unless of course you are an IE6 user in which case you probably won’t find very much. Sorry!.
There are still a few loose ends but I think I need to live with it for a little bit before I know how best to tidy those up.
Steve Tucker comments:
Nice mods, Andrew. I particularly like the sound of that px-to-em calculator. Am I correct then in thinking that your stylesheet is actually a PHP script with a CSS header?
I also think the bottom navigation is much better and as consequence I reckon the site’s now much easier to use.
If I could make one suggestion it would be regarding the comment form - you currently have to click on the feedback link to the right of the article to access it - perhaps you could put another link at the end of the article too, just so it flows a little more? Just a thought.
22nd April 2007 , 20:25
Andrew Rickmann comments:
Thanks Steve. You are right I am using a PHP script with a text/css header. It seemed much more efficient to insert a function so I could tell it what size text I wanted, and what borders I was going to apply and have it calculate the margins and font size in ems for me.
I am going to work on making it suitable for release so it may well turn up as a post here soon.
That’s a spot on suggestion. I have added a link at the bottom of the posts just as you suggest. Of all the things I new I wanted to change I can’t believe I missed that.
22nd April 2007 , 21:26