The main website gets a serious makeover from the cyber-beautician:- a rare appearance by the suppressed artist in me, who must be on speed at the moment. Several days of furiously editing CSS and HTML with a dash of Photoshop and we have V-G Mark II. I did the major upload early this morning, 662 files in all.
Time flies at a depressing rate and it’s hard to believe the site is in its 6th. year, and still retaining its original livery. Perhaps familiarity dulls the senses, at any rate I’ve been thinking for a while that it needed more visual impact and I’m much happier with the new look, particularly the navigation bar and the transparency aspect that was inspired by this Blog layout. The background image may be a bit slow to download on the first visit, but once cached by the browser, pages should load faster than before.
For the techies:-
I’ve tested it on Firefox 3.0.5, Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9.63 and all looks well. None of my computer systems have IE6 now, but the fixed position top and side bars on the pages should - in theory - revert to absolute positioning and scroll up and down along with the main page content. If anyone finds any problems or questionable behaviour, give me a shout.
The navigation buttons on the old site were a bit fragile in recent incarnations of the major browsers: they were CSS-based rollovers that used the trick of a hidden coincident background image that was revealed on the rollover, but the buttons sometimes became ‘wobbly’ if the user changed the page text size. The new buttons are based on background position and are simpler, more robust and much more efficient.
6 Comments
The makeover looks really good, Geoff. No problems with the background image load speed - it was fast first time.
So far I’ve only found one oddity - I clicked on the “Downloads” button, which led to the “Authentication Required” input box. After clicking “Cancel”, the 401-thing comes up. The odd thing is that the “Backpacking in” part of the page-title is obscured by a picture.
It’s not major, but I thought you’d like to know. If you want a screengrab, just holler.
Stef (FF 3.0.8, XP with all updates)
Thanks very much Stef, fixed now.
I always forget about those error pages that deal with HTML 4xx result codes, they are never invoked here on the local copy of the site.
I also fixed the 403 and 404 pages.
Loaded like the speed of light for me too.
Just on a quick look I noticed that when I scroll down your home page the “Backpacking in Britain” legend stays in a static position on the page (i.e. it doesn’t move with the scrolling), so it obscures text further down the page (not sure that I described that particularly well - but unless it’s just my browser, hopefully you’ll see what I mean).
Otherwise, it’s looking good.
(hmm, the text of this comment is wider than the text box into which I’m typing - don’t remember that happening before?)
I (rather belatedly) just read the techie bit. Think I skipped over it the first time because techie isn’t me. Anyway, the problem I’m seeing with the header not scrolling is in IE 6 (in my defence, I’m at work at the moment, so don’t have any option).
Very nice and looks fine on FF. You are a master of the tech stuff. CSS and HTML are way over my head.
Gayle - we are off for 4 days from tomorrow and in a frantic rush, I’ll look at it when I have chance.
Martin - Thanks very much. Tech stuff mastery is a sign of a misspent youth they say, more like a misspent working life in my case… but I don’t know, I’ve done quite well out of it!.