IdioC's Fifth Dimension
It’s been a while since anything happened on this site, partially due to re-establishing my working life after a hiatus, partially due to time restraints and partially because every time I came to update the site, the front page evidently needed work. It was a large (admittedly default) summary of all the pages which didn’t really look that inviting or particularly organised. Just a field of off-pink and greys. It needed hitting aesthetically with a hammer.
A few issues with it came from how it was designed to begin with. The site was designed on a 1024×600 netbook originally and made the transition nicely to my 1440×900 screen (both 16:10), but the menu system, being centred, generated large pastel-pink voids either side of it on larger screens. I’ve returned the system to a fixed-width centre despite the narrowing of the reading space on larger resolutions, to keep the header well-tied to the body.
Another glaring cringe-worthy issue was the background, affecting all pages on the site. The black border around the main content dividing the off-pink from… yet more off-pink. Although not pure black, it was still too strong for a border and the colour needed changing. Something darker was needed in the background to help being out the brighter centre and I toyed with several ideas. Gradients are pretty unoriginal and awkward to “arrange” around the centre for all browsers, as well as looking different between resolutions. Two-toned diagonal stripes are ubiquitous and having a static photograph would cause issues with tiling. The only option was to alter an image I’d taken myself – so as not to pinch someone else’s picture – then stylise it to reduce the number of colours to prevent it being too “busy”. Hopefully it doesn’t look narcissistic having a picture of myself splattered everywhere!
Finally, the front page needed structure of its own, a focus and the site needed some long-overdue links to other things. The old front page showed the title, timestamp and an excerpt of the 10 newest posts (originally it showed the entire post for each). The current one hopefully retains this functionality whilst looking structured and not taking up too much space. The links and twitter integration are all in a similar style to the latest posts and hopefully this makes the site a lot better aesthetically.
…and perhaps most importantly, it’s Firefox 3.6.6 and IE 8.0.6 tested. It has a few W3C validation errors but those will be ironed out in time.
UPDATE (19:13): The site’s pages now validate to XHTML 1.1 and CSS3.