Numerous updates to the Website layout and style
Posted by mholmes on 22 Mar 2007 in Activity log
Made a good start on cleaning up and prettifying the Website:
- Experimented with a gradient background on the menu links, and decided against it. Instead, I put a smaller version of the map in the background of the menu, and made the links appear as buttons which stick down when pressed.
- Removed the top bar and footer. A few people had commented that the footer, which was fixed at the bottom of the screen, could be confusing, because it wasn't clear that more of the page content was hidden behind it and could only be accessed by scrolling. I decided the top and bottom bars were better removed, so the content now extends from top to bottom.
- Rewrote the Authors page. The tabular layout was cluttered, so I've gone for a regular unordered list, with the bio and the articles appearing directly below the author. There are still some inconsistencies in the display of borders on list items -- Safari doesn't show them -- and support for the CSS first-child and last-child pseudo-classes, but it looks OK on all the browsers except for IE6, which is predictably a complete mess. IE6 will probably need its own stylesheet.
- Added a credits page, to include the information that used to be in the footer, in more detail.
- Added an About page, which I took from the info on the title page verso of Vol 15. This is in both English and French, so I arranged the two languages side by side in columns, using left and right floats. This raises the issue of whether the whole site should be bilingual; we should consider this.