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 January 19, 2003 Smile politely
And stab 'em in the back. Papercut Serpent:Deleted, I swore I'd redesign the site and put it up in a paid space. With a domain and everything. I was also tired of trying to remember how I wanted something handled, so I went all out and made very complete style guides. They tell me how every bit of the site is supposed to look: from what format the dates take to how wide images in the art gallery can be. I had a cut off date for making changes to the layout too. Got it in one: I didn't stick to that. *l* I've been busy telling myself that if the site had actually been online, I would have redesigned it and the changes would have shown up on that. Well, no more changes now. I am, however, drawing up plans for the next version... Layout:Probably the biggest change is the menu: it's not in a seperate column this time. Actually I shouldn't make that a blanket statement, because the layout of my sitemap evolved into the index for some of the main indexes and that's two columns. Initially, I split the menus into a global menu (top), info menu (above the date), and the menu menu with its ever-changing links (body). But that was splitting up my menus too far, so I shoved the sitemap link into the global and dropped my email and terms of use down to the bottom of the page with the copyright notice. Now that's efficient use of space! (and it took me how long to figure that out?) I changed the way I dated my pages from "Updated: 8-9-02" to "August 9, 2002." I like it better because it skips past any confusion on which number is the month/day. I also kept the text in a rigid table, but set it off with a left cell/margin instead of centering it. And finally, I cut back on how many colors I used for the text. Thrifty. Graphics:Wow. There are more of them. And they are bigger! o.O Yeah, well, too much usability is a bad thing. When you're getting jealous of other people's sites, you kinda need to let yourself decorate more. I put them in a flexible table outside of the main table so that it would always look like the page was "full." That's a lot of white space to the right at high resolutions. I wanted to re-do all the graphics, but there's a time when you just need to bloody move on already. Sections:Remember that while these changes are presented in a big lump, they took place in the span of a year. * are changes made after the cut off date. Into Tomorrow:Well, that's it. I'm really not allowed to make any more changes. Really! I am channeling all that restlessness into the next version. I have design notes and everything. Now if only I knew php and mysql, I could get started. Well, I guess I'll just have to learn it fast. :) P.S. Style guides can be a big help if you want to keep a consistent look on a big, diverse site. Of course, you have to keep them by you so you can refer to them... ;)
Oops!:When I finally moved things into WoodGrove Designs, I realized I had a problem. The web design tutorials should obviously be on a site about web design, but I wanted hermitism.com to be a resource too. This is what I changed:
I've also decided the Wanderings and Poetry sections' folders will go by three year intervals. The next folders I open up there will be 2004-2006. I'm just not writing enough. *sigh* /^\MSKing © 1997-2003. Please read the Terms of Use. |