Dooce 5.1

So yeah. If you are a visitor of dooce.com, you’ll notice some changes on the site. Make sure you do a Shift-Refresh or empty your cache and reload so that things display like they should. If you have any glaring issues, let me know. The site should look something close to this. The CSS is not valid as I write, but will be later today. The categories dropdown is malformed for XHTML and causes errors before the validator even gets to the CSS. However, the CSS errors are minor and I’m hoping to fix those while everybody recovers from the time change due to daylight savings.

The design is larger than an 800×600 screen, so if your monitor resolution is set to 800×600, the dreaded horizontal scroll bar will make an appearance. AOL users: connect with AOL, then use Firefox to view the site. It looks best in Firefox and Safari, with most of the weirdness in IE on the PC. I’ll need to spend a little more time reading up to fix the center column dots across all browsers and the nav dots in IE. As we said when we first did the redesign, IE Mac is not supported, as it’s a dead browser and there are so many better options out there for Mac users.

I tried a couple of different methods to get to three columns, in the end, glish.com has the method that I used; static widths with floats. Every time I do a site, I gain a deeper understanding of the kvetching about IE on the PC. Something works beautiful in all other browsers and then looks like shit on IE. You fix it for IE and it breaks all the other browsers. The stagnation in development of IE is hurting Microsoft. Analyst stats in media stories about Firefox say Firefox is a certain percentage (usually under 10%) of the browsing public, but across the sites where I see stats, Firefox is at least 20% of traffic, most of the time, it’s even higher.

This time around, since we’d solved site structure problems in the past with Movable Type, getting to three columns once the CSS was done, we were able to hit the templates and rebuild relatively quickly. Every time someone tells me that CSS is not the cure all, I can always use site refreshes as examples. It took a fraction of the time to get the site where Heather wanted it. A fraction compared to the restructure we did last time around.

He-man epilogue: Skeletor’s browser of choice sucks and it’s important to be nice to our friends.