Both Scoble and MJR have referred to Jakob Nielson’s tips for a well designed site, which is actually presented as a list of mistakes.
A lot of the stuff in here prompted me to change the layout of this site.
New Style
Have uploaded and slightly modified a new style. I wasn’t unhappy with the last one, but was concious that it was completely non-standards compliant and very graphics-heavy.
The other advantage of this one is that it goes against the annoying blogging grain of only using three-quarters of the screen. Font size might be a bit big, mind.
So, I am going to give this a go for a while. Let me know what you think!
Browser Wars
Interesting debate on IE vs. Firefox on Palimpsest.
A Busy Weekend!
We have done loads this weekend. I was taken over with a real desire to get out into the fresh air, and fortunately we have tonnes of it around here. Here’s some photos of the places we went – more on my flickr page.
On Saturday, we visited Whittington Castle, which is remarkable for being run not by the National Trust or some large organisation, but a community trust set up by those who live nearby. A great project.
On Sunday we headed deeper into Wales. This is a small stream running between two buildings at William Morgan‘s birthplace at Tŷ Mawr, which is a National Trust site now.
Morgan was the chap responsible for writing the first Welsh language bible. The photo below shows the house where Morgan spent his formative years.
CSS and Standards
I have always been a self-taught bodge job type of web designer, and nothing I have ever designed has passed the w3c validator test.
So, I decided recently, just as a technical exercise, to try and create a site which was both reasonable to look at and standards compliant, using XHTML strict and a CSS style sheet. I also wanted to make the site as small as possible, so not using any graphics.
It took quite a bit of work, and most of this was my own fault in being lazy and reusing a CSS template that I had stuck on my hard disk for a couple of years.
Anyway, it was a useful exercise and the finished result looks alright, and is standards compliant, so I guess I reached my goal there.
In truth the whole stylesheet needs to be gone through and re-written to get rid of a lot of bloat, which I either left in because it didn’t break anything, or just commented out.