Redesign 2004

As many regular visitors can see, the site has been redesigned a bit. I learnt about a bug in IE6 where the page displays in quirks mode if it is parsed as XML, using an XML declaration as the old design was using. I wanted to redo the site in standards mode for all browsers, and had to give up the XML parsing. It displays well in Internet Explorer 6 and the newest versions of Mozilla, FireFox and Opera. As well, I wanted the font to be in EM sizes, not pixels, for better accessibility. Some thumbnails are in EM sizes as well.

Same as the September 2003 redesign, there are still no tables in the main page templates.

I don't like how dark it ended up looking, especially when I ended up testing on other people's monitors (and I thought mine was dark). I hope to make some changes soon to liven up the colours.

The same familiar aspects were kept from the old design. The 4 icons on the left (started as a clique with Sierra, Billyballer, Dorkdave and I) have not been moved. Other sites are starting to implement it for the looks, but they are simply posers in my opinion. I had a reason to make it like that based on my design at the time.

Some people make their own Web pages in notepad like myself, and others don't have the patience. I've been critized for wasting too much time on coding, not using tables for the sake of not using tables, and getting everything to validate just so it validates.

The "waste of space" is still bordering around the top and right sides. The top was originally for a banner or header, and the sides were for buttons to plugins. I removed the buttons years ago because it looked like clutter, but in the name of tradition the waste of space that was made for the buttons stays.

The W3C mini buttons on the left are now entirely CSS coded, rather than images. I love my animated checkmark.

There are no popups in the new design. I am undecided if I will add any. They never seem to work properly.

There is a very sneaky protection/redirection script right in all the new files that I can turn on at any time. Thanks to all the programmers that helped with that. Also, thanks to gprime (John), matttheguy and Fredryk Phox for their support over the last couple weeks.

I will brighten up this new design, and work on some new CSS themes this summer so that everyone can browse with a customized look. I will even post some tutorials for some of the techniques I used in the recoding. Web designers and Flash creators have a lot to look forward to here.

June 17, 2004

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