If you’ve made your way to the site since last night you’ll have seen the new look (a picture of the old one is above if you can’t remember it). I’m not sure if it would be classed as a redesign or realign, but it’s the biggest overhaul I’ve done in a while. I had a few new things I wanted to try out and I had some ideas that had sat around for ages, plus the site was seeming a little sluggish so I got stuck into it and decided to get it done at the weekend.
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Tag Archives: design
It’s not about succeeding, it’s about trying something new
There are some very interesting things going on recently in terms of how we put together our sites and it’s leading to quite a few interesting discussions, mostly between those who aren’t ready to even consider using new web technologies until IE offer support for them and those who have whole heartedly embraced the ideas of progressive enhancement and graceful degradation. Personally I fall into the latter category, using HTML5 to code up sites and using CSS3 all over the place.
The Blonde Board
The Blonde Board is a personal project that has long been in need of a revamp.
Started after a bit of fun at university the web site aims to collect together examples of all the daft things people say.
Having intially worked with a custom CMS (Content Management System) the redesign moved the site onto the wordpress platform with a custom theme.
The Design
The main focus of the theme was to keep things simple and easily readable as the site is heavily text based.
To add a bit of visual interest drop caps were added to the main body of text on each entry making use of a font devlivered by the TypeKit service.
CSS3 and Typekit
The theme makes use of new CSS3 properties and animation. Currently only viewable in webkit based web browsers (Safari and Chrome) the animation of a
stickman dunce character is made when hovering over menu items on the main navigation.
The use of non web safe fonts delivered from TypeKit enable the drop caps to be styled without using image replacment techniques and are also used on the
main site navigation.
Details
- Word press site with custom theme
- Full design and coding of theme
- Use of new CSS3 and TypeKit font replacement
- Site live at http://www.theblondeboard.com
5 things I’ve learnt this month whilst blogging
Well I’ve been doing this web design blogging for a month now. Sure I’ve been working in web design and development for years and I’ve blogged before occasionally keeping fifthandlast.com updated but this is my first time blogging about web related topics. So what have a learnt? A few things actually but here’s 5, mostly learnt from buggering something up. Continue reading
Who are you designing for?
When I started writing on this blog I thought to myself “don’t churn out loads of IE6 posts”, well, I let myself get a little indulgent and wrote one and since then one thought has occurred to me reading people’s anti IE6 comments and all the bring down IE6 websites. A lot of them have quite simply missed the point of the whole thing.
I’m sure we can all agree that IE6 is not a good browser, that it should be gotten rid of and that until Microsoft unplug support it will still be around, but you shouldn’t stop supporting it because YOU don’t like it. According to browser statistics from October Firefox has surpassed IE6 in terms of users but a quick scroll down shows a whopping 23.30% of the market share still sits with IE6! That’s nearly a quarter of internet users still using IE6, sad and annoying – yes, but can you really turn away that many users simply for using a rubbish browser?
So you should really be asking who are you designing for? Are you designing for you and all your colleagues using Safari on the Mac or are you designing for the rest of the world? To reach as many people as possible? Continue reading