Thoughts on the Redesign
Posted by Patrick on Wednesday, January 31, 2007I realized I haven't posted in a while. Over the weekend Kate and I worked on redesigning Rockland-Ave, which was looooonnnnnnngg overdue. I think Dennis had redesigned a dozen times since the last time we cleaned things up around here.
Almost all of the design thinking came from Kate on this one, as I was stuck in a mental rut. I think I'd started to redesign the site four or five times, but got lost along the way, focusing on unimportant things.
Anyhow, I was glad to finish it on Monday. I actually finished it Sunday night, and then I opened it in Internet Explorer and it was a layout train-wreck. An unnecessarily large part of website design and development involves making a site, and then bending and tweaking it to work correctly in Internet Explorer. You can't ignore Internet Explorer, because lots and lots of folks use it. If you design just for IE, you risk goofy-looking-webbage on Firefox, Opera and Safari. Keeps it interesting. 
A few changes. The shout-box is gone, it was good while it lasted but easily broken and not always timely to the posts. Comments now appear just in the pop-up box. I liked having them on the page itself, but it saves a lot of server space keeping them in the pop-ups.
The code running things is much, much cleaner. A couple of years of adding little bits here and there had created sloppyness that was replicated each time a new post was put in. Pages should load more quickly now, as they're free of random inline-styles and hacks.
So we hope you like it, we're both happy with it.
Labels: Nerdery
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