So I’ve not posted in a couple of weeks, and that was primarily due to the sudden influx of things that attacked me at once. One thing that did go relatively well was the CSS reboot for a site I did, LovecraftCountry.com (which I tend to refer to as LC for convenience).
The quest for that site was predominately to not only clean up the code, but to better organize the information. LC is built using the Expression Engine, and had some tables still hanging about in its code. Bigger than that, was the problem of poor organization, which was becoming more and more of a problem as the site content continued to increase.
I finally worked out a method in which to attempt to organize that content using some scripted menus that will (as soon as I add a few extra pages to the site) be entirely backward compatible for people with less capable browsers. It’s fully XHTML 1.0 Strict now, for which I’m rather happy, and all nicely CSS and JS driven (in combination with the PHP of the backend). Overall, I’m pleased with how its turned out.
I added in a site feed from the forums to the main page layout to attempt to draw in some community involvement. The major addition, however, was the middle menu bar, and that has proven to have extremely positive feedback from the existing members. My original plan had been to change the colors of the layout, and move away from the black and lime green. As it turned out, the community spoke up rather quickly upon being shown a working version, and said that they really didn’t want the color scheme to change. That said, the site owner and I decided to go with what the users wanted, and later provide an alternate color scheme for style toggling.
For now, if you’d like to see how the site looks, you can drop over to LovecraftCountry.com, or if you’d like a side-by-side before and after (the pictures are rather small unfortunately) you can check out the project on the CSS reboot site.
~Nicole
