I've spent the last week or so working on revamping the Metascape site to give it a (hopefully) cleaner and less "CMS'ey" look. Along the way, I've become far more familiar than I'd like to be with the vagaries of CSS, browsers, template hacking, etc.. I haven't spent this much time in VM since.. well since I got the site up and running three years ago. I must say that I've been a bit taken aback by the slapped together quality all of the javascript, css and related web infrastructure I've encountered, amd I can't help but look at all the great looking sites out there and realize all of the machinations people have had to go through to make work, and how ugly a lot of the code underneath probably is. On the other hand, CSS itself has a certain kind of elegance and some neat features. One thing that has been interesting to think about in relation to my own work on Acore and Sugar is CSS's approach to having inheritance mediated by containment.
I used Tasktop's excellent site as a bogey, but I haven't been able to get anywhere close to it's quality and user-focussed design and now I've got to move back to writing software, creating builds, etc..There are some cool new features in CSS3 and I've probably overused them. Consequently the site looks (arguably) best on webkit (Safari and Chrome) based browsers, then firefox, and last IE, naturally. I was a bit surprised by how poor firefox's rendering of my and other sites was compared with CSS3. I'm sure if I have any real experience with this stuff I'd have done a better job of getting a consistent result. Anyway, feedback is most welcome. And now that I have this blog appearing as feed into the front page of the site, there will be a bit of self reference there too. I think in the publishing world that's know as "log rolling".
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Nice Layout! Great site!
ReplyDeleteI see lot of new sites with large 'blocks' to navigate instead of smaller 'lists'. Website designers are spending more time to provide a better user experience. Even though, personally, as a programmer, I prefer to see lists to blocks. May be my brain is more used to lists. I can see more content without moving my eyeballs around.
Yeah, it's a tradeoff. I also like to see lots of information at a glance, but the feedback I get consistently form more marketing oriented folks is to make it even more simple and direct. And I think it's true. If you look at the really nice sites like Apple's some links only have a few words..
ReplyDelete