OK, so I’m really impatient. I signed up for the CSSReboot and here I am launching very, very early. Sorry Adam.
Anyway, some notes from the design process as well as my aims for this design.
Continuing the theme of strong warm colours (the previous design was pink for those that never saw it), I decided to go for a very warm deep red with this colour scheme. My job requires me to design very pared-down sites so I like to be a tad exuberant with my personal designs.
Again I have to ensure in all commercial designs I do that the site is totally cross browser compatible (cough IE cough) so thats what I do. However, I’m getting so fed up with dropping in hacks to cater for some browsers (cough IE cough) that I’m growing increasingly uncaring about how my personal sites look in browsers that can’t adhere to standards. Hence I’ve made an effort to ensure the site works for web standards and then put in generic hacks for IE. I suspect the design might jitter slightly in IE5.* for both Win/Mac and I have no idea how it looks in Camino at all. I took at screenie from iCapture for Safari and it looks OK. Not spot on but workable.
This design sees a major semantic overhaul. I’m finally reasonably happy with the underlying code of the site and think I’m now in a situation where a redesign means a CSS overhaul only. Its also the first time I’ve structured my CSS files in such a rigid way (including using conditional statements for IE based CSS) and I think its definitely paid dividends for me in terms of time and cleanliness of code.
My DTD says I’m going for XHTML 1.0 Strict and baring one design element the design meets that criteria. The one area it fails on is the Search suggest tool (type into the search box above you to see what this does). It breaks mainly because for the Javascript hooks to work the form requires a name attribute as well as an id. I’m in two minds as to whether to keep this feature or not. If it gets used a lot I’ll keep it. If it doesn’t I’ll drop it. I’m trying to be more accomodating of users with perceptual/cognitive disabilities and this seemed a very helpful and intuitive addition to my site search options. We’ll see I guess.
As well as the Search Suggest tool, I’ve also added a menu switcher to differentiate between internal and external links.
As regards accessibility, the design mets current Priority One (A) checkpoints. It would meet AAA if it werent for the requirement for liquid layouts in Priority 2 (AA). However, as I’ve said in the past, the current WCAG standard is not great at meeting the needs of uses with a learning or perceptual disability and hence I’ve made my design work for a cross section of users rather than for an increasingly archaic accessibility standard. Here’s hoping WCAG 2.0 is better.
I’ve used the UK Governments accesskey convention for all accesskeys on this site.
I toyed with the idea of content negotiation for quite some time but in the end reluctantly decided to not implement it. Using it means I need 100% accurate code and in a site that allows markup in comments I can’t be sure that will always be possible so for now, I’ll stick reluctantly to tag soup.
Left Brain Right Brain 
awesome job!
Lovely re-design. Its all warm and snuggly. Im gonna come here when I need a visual hug!
Hehe, no reason to apologize to me! We all get antsy with our personal designs — luckily for me, I don’t think I’ll be done anytime soon enough to launch early. But hey, site looks great! Nice warm red, very inviting. Good work.
Thanks all – especially you Adam, I was torn between wanting some feedback and my guilt at launcing way before the alloted time. My ego won ;o)
Very nice and, um, red! I really like the internal/external links switcher. What are the three icons at the top-left supposed to represent (star, code, and what looks like a flower)?
Also some bug heads-up:
– my email address and URL are spilling out of the form fields in the comment form
– you’ve got backslashed quotes appearing in the sidebar links
@Matthew: Those icons would also be bugs. Ouch. They’re supposed to form part of rollovers with links to each category [adds to list].
Just noticed the form spillage myself [also adds to list]. The backslashes should be easy. I’m not escaping properly somewhere.
Thanks :o)
edit: spillage fixed.
edit2:
stripslashes()syntax error fixed. Ahem.I haven’t read the post… I had to jump straight to comments… very very nice indeed… no-one saw 2005 the year of the loved up websites coming, no did they! 😉
Good work Kev!
P.S. I hate that gatekeeper… what colour is gold, err.. yellow… NOPE! doh! let’s hope that I can spell cat before I submit this.
lol…that is a bit ambiguous that question. I’ll change it just for you ;o)
Nice one, I feel mushy here…. I love red just like jemma gura of prate.com 🙂
Heh, I almost called a banana gold now.
Anyway. Great work Kevin. Loving the work on the details. One thing though, without a footer it feels so chopped-off. But I also don’t know if it needs one, cause it fits in nicely like this.
@Rob: I know what you mean about a footer. It seems to just…end. I did try adding something in and I might try again. See how it goes 🙂
Thanks to everyone for the kind words.
While you’ve got the redesign bug, you might like to think about “Fitt’s Law”:http://www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.html#fitts's%20law and your ‘splash’ page – I always want to click on the big picture, but instead I have to click the text underneath.
Beautiful, absolutely beautiful.
Not yet read the post, but am going there now. Just a note, the tabkeys are probably a _little_ wary, in that the tab takes me to the sidebar instead of the comment textarea, after the textile link. But beautiful
Wow, the new design is LOVEly! 🙂 I love the slight glow around the textboxes… wow
Merrrrrrrry Christmas!
Lookin’ good – I like it.
@Indranil: Just got a taste of what you mean on the tab order! Will fix that ASAP(As Soon As Possible).
Thank you Daynah and Nathan :o) and Matthew – its a fair cop Guv, I’ve adhered to Fitt’s now.
edit: tab order fixed.
great redesign!! 🙂
Thanks 15 :o)