This is the alternate version of this page, to show how different it can be by changing a couple of lines of code in the style sheet.
To switch back to the regular version, just
click here
We realize the old version of our website was looking a little tired, a little dated. But, if you run a small business, you know there's never enough time for such things.
So, the next step was to decide how we wanted it to look. More importantly, we needed to decide before we started build it how it would work. That's something we've learned by doing so much design of custom forms, reports and applications - design first, code later.
There is a TON of content on the web about how a site SHOULD function, though it turns out almost every site breaks some or all of those rules because of the inconsistencies of browsers, poor coding tools, or an overly-developed sense of the value of eye candy. Then, of course, there's the complexity required to keep things simple, which many developers struggle with (if it ever even occurs to them to keep things simple).
The "consensus" (if such a thing is even remotely possible on the web) is that designers should consider things like:
So, after reading everyone's opinions and a lot of material on the various new technologies available (Ajax, Java, Flash, etc., etc., etc.), we decided on the key principles that needed to apply to our redesign. Taking account of the considerations above, we decided that bells & whistles were NOT required. There is (as of the launch of the site) no Javascript, no Ajax, no fancy hovering graphics, no animation, no Flash. What we did instead was to build a site that we believe shows consistently in the browsers that 99% of visitors will be using, looks fresh and clean, and just allows you to get where you want to get on the site, quickly and efficiently.
We encountered a LOT of challenges along the way, of course. Turns out a 3-column liquid layout is extremely hard to achieve, and there are no "standard" ways of achieving it. It also turns out that making things look the same (more or less) in different browsers is a significant challenge because each browser implements the agreed-upon "standards" to different degrees, and in different ways. So, what works really nicely in Internet Explorer (IE) might look awful in FireFox (FF), or vice versa (for the record, IE gets slammed as "buggy" more often than FF, but in our opinion, it's just frequently more forgiving of non-standard code). For us, that makes it all the more compelling to keep things simple.
After all, these principles of simplicity and effectiveness are at the core of how we want to help our clients operate their businesses. Fancy graphics, animations and the like are eye candy and they're nice on some sites, but if you're looking at OUR site, we figured you're trying to find information to help your business, not toys. So, for better or worse, we've really tried to keep it simple.
As with any technological endeavour, is it absolutely, completely perfect? No, certainly not. There would be those that say our CSS files define too much and reuse (cascade) too little. Well, maybe so. At the end of the day, it needs to work as well as it can for the resources available to put into it. Sound familiar?
By the way, credit where credit is due: if you're interested in the "liquid layout" idea, we based our design loosely on the "holy grail" approach. You can read more on that here and here if you're interested, and there are lots of good links in those articles. As well, if you're interested in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the guy to start with is probably Eric Meyer - he's sort of the guru of CSS. You'll find his main CSS materials here.
I'm sure there are many others we should credit, but honestly, we read so many of them, it's hard to know exactly how this all came together!
Yup, that's really it!
Please feel free to let me know whether you think we've achieved any of this or not, and certainly feel free to suggest any improvements, point out errors, and so on. No guarantee we'll change anything, but I am certainly interested in the feedback.
Charles Pezzack
Kirby, Pezzack And Associates Inc.