The New old design
If you visit the ol’ Second Negative on a regular basis, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been experimenting with the design a little bit. The “new” design is really just a few small changes to the old design. But you knew that. Thanks to Wordpress 1.5, I can create alternative themes and easily switch between them. And thanks to the Firefox Web Developer extension, I can edit the CSS without using a test environment. Of course, the CSS editor should come with a warning, because once you start, it’s difficult to stop.
Like a number of other people, I usually sign up for a trial account with BrowserCam when I make design changes. It’s the easiest way to view the site as displayed across multiple platforms and browsers. I make a (small) effort to adhere to web standards, and this site will usually validate, but that doesn’t mean it will display correctly for everybody. And truthfully, I only worry about it so much. The stats show that the far majority of visitors are either using a version of Firefox, or Internet Explorer 6.0. I’ll go out on a limb and say that this site should always display correctly in those browsers. As much as I wish Second Negative could be all things to all people, if you’re using IE 4.0, or Netscape 4.78, then you’re probably looking at a mess. Things improve a little with IE 5.0, but there are still a number of display issues. All I can say is…why are you using those browsers?
Also, while you’re listening, do you run Windows XP? If so, and if you haven’t already, then I strongly recommend that you turn on ClearType. In most cases, it will make a tremendous difference in the quality of on-screen text. Considering that novice users probably never figure out how to turn it on (or that it exists), it seems like it would have made more sense to enable it by default.
After I made changes to the layout this weekend, I created an aged paper header that I liked, but I wasn’t sure if it fit the way I wanted it to. Nicole really liked it, so I may bring it out every once in a while. The current header should have a background color similar to navy blue. It’s actually the same color I was using in the original site header. My question is, do you see a shade of navy blue? It’s possible that you don’t, and I may need to consider using a more web safe color. I have a couple of machines over here, and one of them seems to think that the header should be a washed out shade of grey. If you have a minute, and can leave a comment regarding the color you see (or anything related), I’d really appreciate it.
Update (05/11/2005): Okay, I’ve reverted back to a slightly modified version of the original “design”. Sorry if you were a fan of the new design, it just bothered the hell out of me, and I couldn’t figure out why. I’m not comfortable with change.
