LIF2 draft complete!

OK! So all of the pages have now been built and can be viewed at www.thejct.net/lif2.html

I've sent the client an email asking for a review of the work and I'm drawing a line in the sand on Monday re content changes.

The good news is I sorted out the nav bar links re the Fitts Hicks law recommendation. I tried to display: block the links but I wasn't getting a bigger hit area. I couldn't for the life of me work out why until I looked at the layout in firebug and realised that the link area had a height of zero, with zero padding. Which meant zero hit area. derr. So I shifted the padding from the list element to the link and *presto* problem solved.

I also had a bit of a problem reintroducing the PHP form on the contact page. It's the exact same code I used in the prototype, and it seemed to mostly work i.e. it forwarded on the email address when entered and rejected it if the pattern match failed, but kept giving me an error message on loading the page. For some reason it just started stumbling and couldn't identify the variable 'email' (which should have been blank on page load and therefore the form didn't require action or the need to display a message). So I stuck an isset check at the start of the form code and all sorted! (I know I make that sound easy, but it gave me a bloody headache...)

I've already done a W3C check (and passed the strict xhtml test!) but there are still a couple of things that need to be refined, and I'll have to retest once I'm knocked those off.

One thing I need to sort out are the buttons. I have created buttons for the facebook and blog links, but I need different states (on hover/click). I've cross browser tested in IE7&8 and Chrome (PC), as well as the latest Firefox and Safari (Mac). It looks awesome in all except IE7, so I still need to go back and sort that out (I think I'm going to try out putting in hacks like I found in that article last week instead of building a new style sheet - see how well that works).

Something else I need to do (other that find a couple of better quality pictures) is perform a QA check on the whole site and test every link, if nothing else. I had another derr moment last night when I realised I hadn't linked the 'sign up!' button on any of the pages. The quick solution sent the style haywire, so I'll have to revisit that. I did want to change the button anyway, I might have to go back to that CSS button article list and see if something there will help...or try making the whole div a link...