Site redesign
OK, I finally got around to the redesign this weekend, and its gone fairly well. I’ve moved from a liquid to a fixed layout, as the site was almost unreadable on high resolution monitors and many of the design changes I wanted to make become overly complex. One downside to moving to a fixed-width layout occurs with preformatted blocks of text. </code> blocks do not get word wrapped, as such when the text contained within them is too wide, the main content column shifts to the left to display all the text. Theoretically using the <code>overflow: auto</code> property should cause horizontal scrollbars to appear, and indeed this does work on Mozilla, but this behaviour is bugged on IE. I'm working on a fix, but in the meantime I may well go over old posts and reduce the width of the <code>
</code> content (<em>This is now fixed. See <a href="http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/000233.html">IE and overflow: auto</a> for details</em>).
There is also another glitch when the browser is too narrow - rather than simply provide a horizontal scroll, the sidebar starts overlapping the content and the left edge of the content becomes unavailable. This should be an easy fix to implement it, but working out what the fix should be is another kettle of fish entirely.
In the meantime let me know if you spot any broken links or graphic glitches - I'll be refining the design over the next few weeks I'm sure. I'm especially interested to hear from Opera or Safari users...
<em>Update 1</em> Thanks to Cheah for a heads up concerning the forms. They're still a little messed up, but I'll sort them tomorrow. The search reslults are also still in the old style. Search templates are <a href="http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mtmanual_public.html">handled a little differently</a> so they're a bit more awkward to change - another item for the todo list...
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 18th, 2004 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
8 Responses to “Site redesign”
The comment form is center-aligned (as are some other parts), and the text stretches over the entire width of the page (so that it exceeds the bounds of the faux columns). To be sure, I reloaded and also viewed the page in IE.
You may want to check on that.
Gah! Nasty – completely forgot to sort the comment forms out. Sorting them now…
Looks good in Safari. :-)
Well – apart from the forms of course. Thanks Simon :-)
Ah it looks good now. Looks great in fact!
Some suggestions, if I may – don’t be offended!
The main column text needs a little more padding against the faux column IMHO – looking a little too tight for comfort.
The comments textarea need a little more width. In fact, this reminds me to go increase the width of the one at my weblog! :D
Also, having your “Related Entries” section in white and boxed makes it seem like the focus of the blog post, and draws away from the actual entry itself.
Not offended at all – grateful for the feedback. I agree 100% about all of them in fact! The comment form is ugly as sin, but I broke all my nice CSS form layout and that will have to wait till tomorrow. The other stuff should hopefully be fixed by the time you read this…
Good stuff Sam :)
The search templates are quite a pain too I agree, because you have to go edit the template file manually.
Call me Chu Yeow, or just Chu, BTW :)
Will do :-)
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