DiaLOG

July 23, 2003

Designing for the future.

The internet is moving forward, so do we design for the future or are you still stuck designing in the past. By that, I mean do you design with web standards? Designing with web standards makes it easier to design for the future. The case in point was proven while designing American Longevity and Cougar Connexions. We did all of the layouts using web standards and when it came to testing these sites in other browsers we didn’t have to change much in the code for each browser. When we tested the sites in the new apple browser safari, everything looked great. No big hiccups at all. However, when we designed for older browsers (IE 5.x) we did have to add some code and hacks. It is good to see that NN 4.7 is pretty much out of the picture, we didn’t even consider coding for that browser.

So the moral of the story is to continue to code using standards and you assure that your site will look good in modern browsers and future browser to come. At least we hope future browsers continue to follow web standards … he, hem Microsoft take note.

July 14, 2003

Longevity matters

Welcome to all those coming from Zeldman. I have heard from a few visitors about some bugs in Mozilla with “text zoom” and Opera 7 display problems. When we tested the site, we tested it in IE 5.5 and Mozilla 1.x, we understand that there will be a few glitches here and there with other browsers and we will be considering them as we continue. The american longevity demographic only had two concerns. 1) What if someone didn’t have the flash plugin. You will notice that the user won’t notice if they don’t have the plugin, as we used Drew McLellan Flash Satay method. 2)When a user prints a page they don’t want to have to print the nav and have it print on two pages when it could fit on one. A CSS print style sheet was obviously the answer. From there we just took it and ran with the architecture and design.

July 11, 2003

AmericanLongevity

As mentioned before, American Longevity has finally launched. Another site built with CSS and great design. The site uses Contribute for content managment, it has terrible support for CSS but there are bugs that you can take advantage of and still allow the content managers to edit the pages in Contribute.

July 03, 2003

A CSS portal site

We just launched a portal website, using all css for layout. Unfortantly, you can’t get into the portal unless you sign up. The external marketing pages use a somewhat css-table hybrid for layout.

Not only does the portal use CSS layout but the shopping cart does too. We used 3 style sheets for the site. One for the portal, another for the shopping cart, and a global stylesheet. The layout is currently fluid (expandable to any size in the window). There were several struggles in getting that to work but if we decide to change in to fixed width, it will only require one change to a property in the stylesheet. Behold the power of CSS!