A Decision
Posted on August 17th, 2008I 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!
August 17th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Ah, looks great! This might be my favourite layout so far.
August 18th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Purty! I like 🙂
August 18th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
@Rodney: Thanks! I was definitely going for a simpler design, and for one that could be modified easily. (That’s not to say that modifying the old one was hard.. it was basically 20 minutes of creating the graphics and changing the css file! It certainly helped that I was reusing the same colour scheme as the old site, too!) Are you still LiveJournalling?
@Donella: I’m glad that you like it! You were one of the people who made a comment about that pesky vertical scrollbar. And now you know that I listen to your feedback (even though it took a long time for me to effect a change) 🙂
August 19th, 2008 at 8:27 am
I like the layout, too!
August 20th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
I’m glad you changed it. The scrollbar would never scroll for me so if you posted any length, I always missed the end. Nice change!
August 21st, 2008 at 9:11 pm
@Dan: Thanks!
@Jasmine: Wow talk about ESP! I was thinking that it has been a long time since I have heard from you! I recalled that you also had some gripes about the site and I’m glad to hear that it’s working better for you! (And I would expect posts of good length in the future.) How have you been?!
August 23rd, 2008 at 2:16 am
Yes, the LJ is alive, though most of my posts are locked and I only post two or three times a month. I’ve been working on continuing “The Don Files”, and I hope to have that wrapped up and posted by the end of next month.
August 23rd, 2008 at 9:13 pm
I’ve just been reading your blog via RSS for the past few months so the scrollbar had stopped bugging me but I’m glad you dropped it because it really did mar the page. Much nicer now.