Posts Tagged: Web Design
VGVA.com redesign: the frontend
Layout-wise, I made a few changes to VGVA.com. First, a much wider default width (from 800 to 1024 pixels) allowed me a second sidebar. After a lot of experimentation and feedback from the VGVA board, I displayed our sponsors in two cycling blocks (thank you, jQuery Cycle Plugin!), plus a separate block for new “official supplier sponsor” volleyballstuff.net. Team sponsors should be pleased, at least; their logos had previously been stuck below the footer.
The VGVA.com redesign
For several months, I’ve been hard at work redesigning the Vancouver Gay Volleyball Association website. Longtime readers will remember previous posts wherein I expressed my insecurities, then my excitement at tackling its redesign in 2008. Now in 2011 comes another redesign, even more extensive.
WordCamp: Developers
Yesterday was a very, very good day. Why? Because I went to WordCamp: Developers, that’s why! A whole day of knowledge, hot geeks, and interesting people. Though I’ve been tinkering with WordPress for a few years now, I’ve been starting on larger projects for other people (both volunteer and paid). It’s exciting and a little scary.
NetSquared Camp 2010
Okay, now that the film festival’s done, I’m finally free to blog about NetSquared Camp 2010, an unconference of activists, technologists, entrepreneurs, and assorted geeks who want to make the world a better place, in a full-day extravaganza of sharing and networking. It was my first NetSquared Camp ever, and I’m still digesting everything I’ve learned. Here’s a rundown of the talks I attended:
The New Look
Well, that took a lot longer than I expected. But then these things usually do, right?
What I learned from managing the COMP 1950 project
COMP 1950 — Intermediate Web Design & Development. I decided to take this course because, though I’ve been doing Web design for years, it was all self-taught, and I figured there were some gaps in my knowledge and methodology.
Accentuate the Visual
I’ve been working on a redesign of this blog for a while now, on and off, and it’s finally close to done. At the same time I’m updating a lot of my posts to add more inline photos.
I feel like I just found the button that turns my car into a giant mecha
… though it’s still got some weird bugs, and the same clunky interface.
Blue!
No, not me. I’m still between jobs, still looking, but I’m not letting it get me down. I’m keeping my brain active, playing around with cool Web technologies like jQuery and Flex. It’s fun.
In addition to learning new tools, I’m building my portfolio.
Chaos and Numbers
I finally have the bones of my new design. It’ll be a 3-column layout, 960px wide. Spent so much time fiddling with the widths, and then it hit me: all I had to do was take a clue from the 960 grid system and let column widths be fractions of the total width. Easy-peasy.
What’s inspiring me
AdamSchwabe.com: a wonderfully clean, minimalist site. Not just in the look; note that a lot of common blog functionality is missing: Category listings or tag cloud? Browsable archives? Blogroll? It has none of these things, and doesn’t especially need them. [...]
Geography
A little while back I wrote that, in the blog’s new version, I’d be proudly displaying my daily pictures of Sunset Beach in the sidebar. This is still the plan. And with a much wider layout it’s absolutely feasible. But in the last few days of figuring out widgetizing sidebars (two of them), installing a few more plugins, deciding on all the right navigation aids and so on, I hadn’t really visualised how big a 240 x 180 image was. Stuck on top of the sidebar, I feel it’s becoming a focus point of the whole page.
Tagging
I’ve been reading this very excellent blog full of tips and info about Wordpress. Right now I’m pondering tags and categories.
Back to basics
Redesigning my site is always a special time. It’s a time to start fresh, re-examine all my assumptions and past decisions, ask the hard questions. It starts with the content. What should I keep? What should I add? What should I drop? Before I even get to work on the design, I need to know what I should be designing for.
To Flickr or not to Flickr
Way back when, as I started to work on my site’s present design, I made a conscious decision not to use Flickr. The disadvantages, as I saw them, were: (a) I couldn’t style it, (b) current incoming links would be broken, and (c) I wouldn’t have access stats. Turns out (c) is not true, (b) doesn’t really apply since I don’t think I have any incoming links to my photos, and (a) is actually not that big a deal.
The Reveal
Remember the project I mentioned a couple months back? Wondering how that’s going?
I am abuzz with ideas
So, funny story. Shortly after writing this post, I emailed the board chair, asking that a site redesign be put on next meeting’s agenda. He totally agreed, and in fact had already been planning to discuss the website (which I now feel I can name). They were going to redesign it last year, but the guy who volunteered got too busy. Which means I’m not stepping on anybody’s toes, so bonus there.
Carpe Crisitunitatem
I’ve got a dilemma. Well, it’s not really a dilemma, more me working up the nerve to do something.
File sorta not found
Well, the site itself works just fine, but it looks like there were a few issues left to deal with.
First, Wordpress wasn’t returning the right status code (404) when a requested page couldn’t be found. That was easily fixed. Returning the correct HTTP status is not too important for human browsers but is a huge deal for search engines because when you’re indexing the Web you need to know which pages actually exist.
Curtain Up!
Well, hey, that was pretty painless. I was worried about having to move my Wordpress installation from one directory to another, but it went off very smoothly. Of course, then I had to do a bit of cleaning up, re-upload my images, and so on.
So here we are. 6+ months of work, on and off at times, have finally paid off.
