Contrast (speaking of colours)

So, the LIF2 build is coming along swimmingly - I've completed the major parts of 4 of the 5 main pages, just a few tweaks need to be ironed out.

One of those tweaks is I want to make all the links the same colour, and make that colour different to the text on the rest of the site, for accessibility/usability reasons. Interesting that I came across this article today on A List Apart 'Contrast is King' .

It reminded me how necessary appropriate contrast is when considering accessibility/usability and I felt like smacking myself over the wrist for having forgotten it. The article lists a couple of sites with useful tools, like Graybit, which converts your site to shades of gray (thejct.net comes up fine. LIF2 is OK, except for the 'sign up' button). Check my colours looks for contrast ratios between elements on a site. LIF2 didn't fare well at all with 61 errors....

My favourite tool from the site is the Colour Scheme designer (I'm really getting into these at the moment). The best thing about this one compared to the others I've come across so far is you can see what the chosen palette will look like based on your choice/extent of colour blindness, which is quite cool (i.e. contrast is obviously taken into account). I can't use the most up to date version on my work PC (IE6), but rather than just tell me I can't use it and how crap I am for having an old browser, it lets me use an older version, which still works pretty well (yay for degrading not abusing re older browsers).

I think I'll be reviewing the LIF2 colours (again) using this site - and probably choosing a consistent link colour based on it.

Usability, Hicks & Fitts laws and web links

http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/fitts-law-hicks-law/

A couple of take aways:

• display: block the link in a button to increase the clickable area
• make the text next to a radio button clickable as well by adding an id to the input and a label to the text. You should be doing this for accessibility reasons anyway
• reduce visual clutter and click options

CSS and opacity

http://www.impressivewebs.com/css-opacity-reference/

A good guide to how to achieve it.

Important note at the end, to be aware that you won't be complying with with current W3C standards if you use CSS opacity. So might be sticking to the background image on repeat for now...

LIF2 draft uploaded

So, I uploaded the first draft of the LIF home page last night at www.thejct.net/lif2.html

I built it using the 960 grid system, with the 12 column split. After reading Neilsen's article yesterday (see Tot's Jots), as well as listening to my instincts, I decided to shift to the 16 column version and shrink the picture on the RHS (as it turns out, I've shrunk it so it would actually still suit the 12 column split). I did this also because as I was about to start coding the other pages, I realised I was going to have to work with a hell of a lot of text and wanted the RHS column size to be consistent throughout the site (plus the images aren't amazing so I'd rather have the focus brought back to the text).

So far, it's looking much better. I'm definitely preferring the new version. I'll make a final call re the column split number once I plug in the content on the 'Personal Training' page and see how it all best fits...

JQery image slider

http://nivo.dev7studios.com/

I think I'm going to have to start a spreadsheet in google docs for all of these useful resources I've been stumbling across...

Colours and shades

So I'm checking out if/how I can achieve what I want re the background of the LIF2 home page. I wanted to achieve a gradient shading using CSS. I found this handy site re how to make transparencies happen cross browser:
http://css-tricks.com/css-transparency-settings-for-all-broswers/
which is great - except it shades out the content as well as the background. When i apply it to the div. Maybe I could just apply it as a class to the background image? Not thinking clearly, rather tired...

Anyway, another alternative is to have a repeating shade image, which is what I've figured most sites seem to do. If I'm interpreting things correctly...

In the mean time I'm looking at shades of colours, so I can just use a gradient of the key colours on the site (so I don't have too busy a palette). A couple of handy sites:
http://www.december.com/html/spec/colorshades.html A list of colours and for each, 3 shades lighter in hex
http://slayeroffice.com/tools/color_palette/ Awesome tool, creates 10 shades of a base colour, with degrees of opacity

Now, back to fun and games with vertical alignment...

LIF2 redesign update

OK, so I'm trying to stick with the 960 grid design (I keep coming across articles all over the place re designing with grids, so I figure it's probably a good thing to get used to working with). The 960.gs CSS/HTML generator seems like it would be useful for mock-ups and prototyping (which I might use it for next time, instead of ppt) but not so much for a short cut build (although I suppose you could. I just don't like the idea of so much redundant code sitting out in the wild...). The gridder bookmarklet is great, for quick placement checks (although annoying it's not accessible offline - at least I've got firebug handy).

I downloaded a trail version of Photoshop as Gimp, while useful and an awesome free program, just wasn't cutting it for what I needed to to (including designing my business cards, which I needed to CMYK colour design for the print peeps). I'm just going to have to bite the bullet an buy the CS4 package... It's been fun having the freedom to easily work on images again, I have to say...

So I've started pulling together the first draft of LIF2 and it's been way more difficult than i anticipated (of course :-) I've been stuck trying to get things to align all over the page like I want them (another reason why 'll be mocking up in code from now on...). I decided to go and have a sticky-beak at how other people achieve what I'm trying to achieve, to try to get some idea of what I'm doing wrong. I popped over to a similar site built by a design agency who shall remain nameless (they've been on my radar re future employer) and discovered that they built the whole thing using tables. Tables within tables. I can't tell you how disappointed I am. It's exactly what I've been taught what NOT to do. I understand it's probably a quick/dirty way of building (and if a company wants a cheap web presence, it's probably the way things go), but I honestly didn't think that was done anymore.

This being said, I'm now torn. Do I treat this as a learning experience and try to get the most out of it by sticking to my table-less CSS laying out, or do I just get something up sooner rather than later to display my design and focus on flash/job hunting?

And then there's the photo issue - the client sent through some great shots, but none that are really suitable for the front page. We need some that are personal, face-facing, connecting shots, and we probably need to look at organising new ones of her clients or purchasing some stock photos. Which probably isn't out of the question - if that's all this redesign costs her, I don't think she'll complain...

Colour combos

I'm about to start building the nav bar for LIF. Not sure I'm sold on the grey I've used in the mock-ups so I'm doing a bit of colour combo research. Found a couple of handy looking sites:

Colour combo library: http://www.colorcombos.com/ Searchable by colour (in hex)

Colour calculator: http://www.drpeterjones.com/colorcalc/ converts rgb/hex and allows you to tweak the colour incrementally. Cool tool.



ps this looks to be the closest in the bunch - I might try using the blue and grey and see how it looks http://www.colorcombos.com/color-scheme-14.html

pps even more awesome - helps you pick complementary colours!!!

Portfolio site complete (mostly)

OK - so I polished off a fair bit yesterday on the portfolio site:

• Content complete
• new footers on all pages with functioning links
• breadcrumb navigation on all pages with functioning links
• checked and passed W3C compliance (XHTML and CSS) on all pages
• moved css files on server to one folder and now all pages point to only two files

There's still a bit that needs to be done:

• I'm not happy with the navigation, esp the footer. Need to sort that out (incl move the email underneath the main links (and make it look like an email link!))
• Will make sense once I do a content and link audit plus map site structure. I know I should have started with this, but I needed to get something up ASAP for the job hunt, so there are files all over the shop (time for a tidy!)
• Cross browser testing. Just launched it again in IE6 here at work and slightly horrified.
• Link up larger versions of a couple of the Zauron pics
• Refine a bunch of stuff - content, make it only one css file for whole site, get rid of multiple copies of images and therefore links.
• Down the track - redesign the CSS. Make it prettier :-) (after I'm done with the LIF redesign)

Cross browser testing tools

So, although I checked out the updated portfolio site on Safari last night (and have been using FF during the build), I just loaded it in my lovely work IE6 browser and was horrified. It's not too bad, but crap enough to annoy the hell out of me.

I've decided to check out online cross browser testing tools. I found this useful reference: http://designm.ag/resources/cross-browser-testing/

I think Browsershots was the free online tool I tried to use before - tried being the operative word. The time lag was so massive I think it finally dumped my request. I've just signed up for the basic account with Litmus, but so far having very little joy. The test page keeps bugging out and crashing. I'll give it a go once I get home on the Mac but I'm not holding my breath...

Revised portfolio site up - but still 'under construction' arrgghh!

I worked my backside off yesterday between jobs to finish off as much as possible of the portfolio site as I could. I was really hoping to have it finalised and uploaded last night, but didn't quite get there.

The biggest time thief at the moment (now that I've worked out the style. For now.) is writing the content on the fly. I'm having to write up new short blurbs again for each project - and trying to keep it concise is the biggest challenge!

I had planned to hold off uploading the new look until it was complete, but was sitting on such a big change I couldn't wait. It's all done, except half of the portfolio page and the missing content can be found in the academic portfolio. I changed the blurb at the top of the portfolio page to reflect that. What I really wanted to do was stick one of those horrible 'under construction' gifs there, like you used to see in the 90s all the time. Maybe it would be acceptable again - is it long enough ago to have evolved to retro yet?

Anyway, even as is, I like the new stuff better than the old stuff. I thought I might be able to get away with it as I don't imagine it's a high traffic site at the moment. At least I don't think so - I really should check the analytics stats...

I still need to tweak a list of things and make sure it's W3C compliant etc - I'm hoping I'll be finished with that this evening so I can get started working on the LIF redesign (and start the job hunt in earnest again!).

Tables and CSS

Having fun on a rainy day playing with table formatting for the portfolio site.

As always, the W3schools site is invaluable (refreshing my memory re what you can do with CSS) but having most fun colouring in with HTML - handy colour chart http://html-color-codes.com/

Updating thejct.net website

So I can get back onto actively looking for work, i thought I'd better prioritise fixing the portfolio site. I thought I'd adapt the academic portfolio site style and apply something like it to the main thejct.net homepage. I attempted to set it up with a 960px width and line up divs along the bottom with links to the different portfolios, as well as my sites/blogs. Suddenly things started going pear shaped. The link divs all hung down past the white background but seemed to be actually in the body wrap div (according to Firebug and FF Web Dev), plus the footer was the correct distance below. I just spent this afternoon fiddling with everything and I couldn't work out why it was doing it.

Finally found this article useful : Barelyfitz Designs' Learn CSS Positioning in 10 steps

It turns out the position: relative main div and the float: left child divs weren't playing well together. For the academic portfolio I had the divs wrapped by other divs with clear: both, but this didn't seem to work for the main page, so I created an empty new div after the link divs and had it clear: both, which seems to have solved the problem...

Thoughts on CSS for LIF2

OK, good feedback from the client re the mock-ups - she's even going to check out her picture stash to see if there's anything useful, which will save me a mountain of time sourcing stuff/taking pictures!

Anyway, just thinking about how to start the build. I started work in Gimp on the header bar/logo yesterday, but found the 800px width quite restrictive and small. Just did a quick search re idea on best practice standard sizes - started with the Yahoo Pattern library and noticed their grid suggestions mentioned 750px and 950px, but no 800px. I reckon thinking may have evolved since I last looked into this... A quick search on the net popped up these articles that I'd like to go back and review this weekend:
960 grid system (http://960.gs/)
Which CSS grid framework to use - article by Net tus+ (http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/which-css-grid-framework-should-you-use-for-web-design/)

I also figure I proved that I can build sites from scratch with all of my uni projects, so to save myself some time, I'm going to not reinvent the wheel and check out trying to use some sort of CSS generator/grid builder. I figure I should now be able to tweak whatever they create to suit my needs. This list looks promising:
15 Extremely useful CSS grid layout generators (http://www.webdesignbooth.com/15-extremely-useful-css-grid-layout-generator-for-web-designers/)

But for now...it's beer o'clock!

Launch into fitness Mark II

OK, in order to improve the look of my portfolio, as well as incorporate a bunch of review requests from the client, I'm giving Launch into Fitness a makeover, to hopefully make it less 90's style and more Web 2.0

I've reviewed the content and created a slightly different site structure - loosing the 'useful info' page, reassigning the home page info and shifting the privacy policy onto it's own page. I have very roughly mocked up the core pages in Powerpoint to show what I have in mind. I'm going to stick with an 800x600 px format and try where possible to keep the content from having to be scrolled. The colours aren't quite bang on, as the transparencies in Powerpoint didn't translate well...