The Fanzone!, our site forum and message boards, has undergone a layout design. Based on the BlackBox theme layout by Crip for SMF.
I really like the look of this theme and have modified some of the css to enhance the functionality and overall look of the site in multiple browsers. As far as the available themes this one is a good fit, from my perspective, for our website and its common look and feel.
The first aspect was to remove the fixed width aspect to allow for a more fluid layout by changing the wrapper width to 100%. The next changes were to enhance links so they have a distinctive difference from the text. I Added yellow font color with additional black background for link hover, to highlight and contrast hovered links and added underline to links in post fields, to highlight links. This is most noticeable when hovering over the link.
Check it out and let us know what you think!
Thanks again Crip for the great layout!
The Administrator
"What Happens in Windsor...Stays in Windsor!"
Showing posts with label css. Show all posts
Showing posts with label css. Show all posts
31 August 2008
23 May 2007
New Sample's
Check out our sample profile pages. They are standard compliant and W3C valid XHTML, CSS.
- Sample A : This is a 2 column fluid layout with a left side menu column. This layout is shown in blue. View this Example
- Sample B : this is a 2 column fluid layout with a right side menu column. This layout is shown in red. View this Example
- Sample C : This is a 2 column fluid layout with a left side menu column. This layout is shown in black. View this Example
12 May 2007
Redesign
A little about the sites current upgrades.
As the site traffic has increased and I speak to other web developers I have noticed an increase in non-traditional browsers visiting the site. This began several months ago while beta testing some new css layouts. I noticed that as I re-developed the pages with relative sizes for tables and font sizes, traffic increased a little. As I tweeked the pages and continued to clean up the code to speed up the load times I also noticed another bonus, a big increase in search engine crawls and indexing which helped with rankings as well. The beta testing went better than expected and I was pleased with the results. At the time all of the sites pages were coded in html 4.01 transitional or loose, many did not validate but it didn't seem to matter much, or so I thought. as I began another development project I figured it was time to utilize xhtml strict. Now there were many reasons for the switch to xhtml but the one that stuck with me was cross browser compatability. As the other project developed that project a whole new aspect came to light, accessibility. I will expand on that at another time. But for now the basic fundamentals were to design for cross browser support and graceful degradation, (more browser friendly and give nicer results to mutiple screen widths). The best way to achieve this was to scrap the idea of utilizing tables for page content structure and developing tableless layouts with css. Again I launched a few beta pages, tried to break them with different tools and browsers and noticed a big change in search engine results! The more I developed the style with css coding the cleaner and smaller my pages were which tranlated to faster loading and better search engine results. What a bonus! But an even greater bonus was the increase in text based browsers and handheld devices too! Well that has led me to re-develop before the last redesign was completed but sure saved a lot of double work and a lot of headaches to boot.
As the site traffic has increased and I speak to other web developers I have noticed an increase in non-traditional browsers visiting the site. This began several months ago while beta testing some new css layouts. I noticed that as I re-developed the pages with relative sizes for tables and font sizes, traffic increased a little. As I tweeked the pages and continued to clean up the code to speed up the load times I also noticed another bonus, a big increase in search engine crawls and indexing which helped with rankings as well. The beta testing went better than expected and I was pleased with the results. At the time all of the sites pages were coded in html 4.01 transitional or loose, many did not validate but it didn't seem to matter much, or so I thought. as I began another development project I figured it was time to utilize xhtml strict. Now there were many reasons for the switch to xhtml but the one that stuck with me was cross browser compatability. As the other project developed that project a whole new aspect came to light, accessibility. I will expand on that at another time. But for now the basic fundamentals were to design for cross browser support and graceful degradation, (more browser friendly and give nicer results to mutiple screen widths). The best way to achieve this was to scrap the idea of utilizing tables for page content structure and developing tableless layouts with css. Again I launched a few beta pages, tried to break them with different tools and browsers and noticed a big change in search engine results! The more I developed the style with css coding the cleaner and smaller my pages were which tranlated to faster loading and better search engine results. What a bonus! But an even greater bonus was the increase in text based browsers and handheld devices too! Well that has led me to re-develop before the last redesign was completed but sure saved a lot of double work and a lot of headaches to boot.
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