I guess I answered posed in the previous post: it looks like I’m keeping the site! This mild facelift should be testament to my intentions of maintaining the site a little bit better. I actually did the redesign in PhotoShop over a year ago but just sat on it until I got tired of the now-obsolete layout.
Part of the motivation of changing the layout is due to some feedback that I got from some of the regular users; the largest complaint had to do with the vertical scrollbar that appeared all too often when content in the main panel exceeded the borders. As someone who has been doing user interfaces for a while, it should have been corrected a long time ago. In my defense, however, I wanted to have a very strict (and, therefore, predictable) layout so that any changes could be done with little chance of breaking something else. I also wanted to have the navigation menu available at all times.
The practicality of that decision, though, was not ideal. Most of the pages had more content than the main pane and, coupled with the fact that the padding at the top was non-trivial, that annoying scrollbar appeared often. Thus, I opted to follow the norm and allowed the navigation menu to scroll away and got rid of that nested scrollbar.
This has resulted in some excellent side-effects. Most notably, the website should be much better to browse on a mobile browser. So, for all of your Palm-, BlackBerry-, or iPhone-toting people out there, I hope you’ll appreciate the difference! 🙂 I do!
