Dontcom 3.01
August 17th 11 commentsI released the mockup for the redesign some weeks ago. During then and now several things have happened that have prevented me from releasing this sooner.
The Delay
- Illness
And when I say illness, I mean illness. I’ve been sick for well over a month. I’ve taken over a week off work due to this fucken flu! I’ve been sneezing, coughing, aching, sleeping and trying like hell to get rid of this bloody headache. My sinuses completely shat themselves which led me to visit the doc - the antibiotics and pheudoephadrine have worked a treat. - Work
We’ve been hella busy at work the past few months. A really awesome New Zealand real estate website has just launched. Check it out, it’s quite nifty with RSS, AJAX, webstandards and CSS. PLUS is looks real perdy! :)
The Site
Finally I’ve managed to actually make this new design live! It’s still very much a work in progress. It looks and behaves very well in standards based browsers. There is, however, a HUGE issue with the home page in IE. (If anyone knows what the hell is going with the “Operation Aborted” malarkey I’d be really stoked if you shared the answer with me.)
What I Wanted to Achieve
The main thing I wanted to do was to move my old photoblog over to this platform. I’m slowly moving all my photos from the old one to this site. You’ll be able to see the photos I’ve uploaded already.
Some other things I wanted to get going is to try to integrate other web apps. You’ll notice that you can add posts to your favorite social networking websites with a simple click of the mouse. I’ve implemented tagging (with links to the corresponding Technorati tag page).
On the home page you’ll be able to see my top 10 bands (as assembled by last.fm); a random selection of Flickr photos and finally, the latest posts from Manda’s and my food blog.
Feedback
As I stated before the site is still in development so please - if you find any issues, use the comments and/or contact form to let me know. I’ve been staring at the code for way too long to pick up all the issues.
Hey Darren, great to see the new design in action! Looks fantastic! I’m off to continue exploring all the new goodness ;)
The font is too small man
But the site looks great ;-)
Dave - do the following:
View > Textsize > Larger
the font is sweet in firefox on linux..
the font (trebuchet) is feminine :) The colours (blue/teal/blue) are masculine. Anyway, regarding font-size, I don’t know what 76%/150% as your body font is about, but my rule of thumb is ’start relative and always go up’ - in other words, font-size:small to start with then 1.2 em etc. for other elements. I never do 0.8em or 80%, rather do font-size:smaller or font-size:x-small as these are relative and therefore when a browser gets to it’s lowest renderable size it goes no further. 76% on the other hand is absolute and will render unreadable if the initial font-size is very small. I could be wrong but that is my experience with older browsers.
Anyways, kudos on realestate.co.nz and this site, leaps and bounds over their predecessors.
Curious as to how you’ve integrated your photos with WordPress, did you use a plugin or a custom template?
Matthew: a lot of hacking at the template files using mainly the is_category(’photos’); conditional tag in the single.php template file. I’m using the photopress plugin for my image management. It automatically creates thumbnails, etc. I’m also using a plugin called next in category for the photo page.
My theory behind the font sizing is outlined in this very good blog post. I’ve had problems with font sizes as keyword in IE. When you take the font size down a notch it goes WAY too small…unreadable, even.
Damn it! How did I miss the relaunch?!
Oh wait, I know, was too busy working and studying :o\
Anyway, it looks awesome! Wanna have a belated launch party in Sydney? ;o)
4 weeks and counting until I see you again. :o) Can’t wait. Hi to Her Loveliness too, and I hope you feel better now.
Cheers and beers!
Darren, a belated thanks for the photo info, I’ll look into that some more.