Tricklin

I put the finishing touches on my new design this past weekend, and I'm pretty happy with the results. It still maintains that clean look, but I've added a bit of pop to it with the addition of the background, a few footer additions, some font fixes, and other miscellaneous modifications.

The first thing I added was a new background, that fills the left and right sides of the content with a bit of color. The beauty of this implementation, is that the diagonal lines, are actually a repeating transparent PNG. This allows for me to change the background color to anything I please.

Along with the new background change, I also decided to keep a piece of the old design. My wife commented that she really like the image of the leaf cradling the droplet of water, and I agree with her. It's a nice image, and I feel it has become a sort of staple of the site. Because of this, I decided to put right back where it was. Because I'm using transparent PNGs for this, the background color, and the leaf don't appear for IE6 users, and I'm okay with this. I don't want to bend over backwards for a browser that doesn't support transparent PNGs.

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I must admit, I was getting a little sick of the old design. It was starting to seem a little too busy to me. And if you look at this new design, you'll notice that I went in the extreme opposite direction. I initially created this design with a quick PhotoShop mock-up. Yes, it may seem a bit ridiculous that I spent time creating a mock-up of such a plain and simple design such as this, but let me tell you: having a mock-up, makes creating the XHTML/CSS code that much simpler.

So, I started on the WordPress CSS, and once I was finished with that, I moved over to the CSS for the rest of the site. Once I was done, I then had to convert all of the non-weblog files from ColdFusion to PHP, as the new hosting company doesn't provide support for ColdFusion. Converting over to PHP, in my opinion, is a wise move. It's always better to have experience with open-source languages, as they don't require expensive licenses to run.

I'm not 100% sure that this will be the final design, but I think it's a great stepping stone for any future enhancements. In short, I wanted to make my site less busy. I wanted to try and make my site look nice and clean, without a bunch of bells and whistles.

I realize that I haven't written anything in a rather long time. There are a few reasons for this, the main one being the release of IE7, and the fact that 70% of the pages of my company's online application would not appear correctly when using it. This wouldn't be too big of a deal if Microsoft hadn't announced that IE7 will be part of an automatic update. Because of this, and the fact that an actual date was never stated, our web development team spent countless hours modifying our code on the pages that were having problems with IE7. You may be surprised to hear read this, but in a way, I have been able to see this as a good thing.

A Good Thing? You Must Be Out Of Your Mind!
Yeah, I know, spending 14 hours a day for the past 2 weeks re-writing html pages just so they work in one browser doesn't sound like "A Good Thing". After all, the entire application worked fine in Firefox, Opera, IE6, etc. How can I possibly say this is a good thing? Well, let me start off by saying that this application was originally created in 1998, and about 4 years later, was revamped a bit, but as far as a focus on well formed, standards compliant html code goes, this never surfaced as a concern for us. We created the pages to work, with little concern about the format of the code. So, all pages used tables for formatting, and would have failed a validation test miserably.

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