Site updates
I mentioned I was tweaking the site design, mainly to clean up my stylesheet.
The first thing I did was to sketch my site on paper, and (re)name all the elements of it – page became sitebox, widecolumn became copyblock etc. By stripping it back so far, I was able to pare down the styling.
I immediately discarded Internet Explorer 6 – it has too many CSS flaws. The older version loaded in a few IE6 rules, the new one will use a lighter stylesheet overall, and make IE6 pull in a heavier sheet – why penalise users with good browsers? So it’s Firefox and Safari all the way for testing.
Previously to satisfy IE6 I had lots of nested divs – right from the start I had already slimmed the site down. I quickly blasted through, ditching the old nested divs and adding some comments to the code – this makes it easier to debug (although the hardest thing about debugging is nested divs anyway….). The divs I kept got condensed – rather a separate entry for each margi as before, I used the formatting “margin: top right bottom left;”.
Next I removed a bunch of my microformatting – font sizes and link colours and container divs, just to make it easier to add them back in again later.
At this stage, the site is fully functional, but ugly. Really ugly, but it’s a good foundation to continue from tomorrow.