The new website is up and going. Unfortunately we could not support Internet Explorer 6 with this design. We do realize that the majority of our readers probably will use Internet Explorer 6. We plead with you to use another browser if not for your own safety, but to just view this website. The website will be supported in part in Internet Explorer 7, however. It is hard to support a browser that is only in beta form and will support more than it does in the final version. The website relies heavily on the CSS property display:table. We certainately hope that it will support it in the future. Other options do exist, but to do so would require more code and make the website less efficient. If it does come to that we will change the code to support Internet Explorer 7. It can be supported in the state it is now, but we are choosing to wait until it is completed. Please bear with us. It does, however, support 8bit alpha channels at the moment in 32bit PNG files, but it has problems with the gAMA chunk within the files; that is avoidable by using programs to remove the gAMA chunk, though. Safari still has problems with the gAMA chunk as well. We are saying that the website is not supported at all in Internet Explorer 6 and below, but the website will still be fed to people using that browser, but just without stylesheets. Because we use web standards and semantics the website will be fully navigatible without CSS, but it can be difficult to navigate with the lack of CSS because of the lack of contrast with the PNG images.
The website’s code is much more efficient than before. There is an absolute clear separation of markup and PHP code. This makes the website much easier to update and change if we need do, like if we need to alter the site’s markup and CSS to support Internet Explorer 7 in the future. This means less money on bandwidth usage for us, less processing power needed for our host, and less loading time for you guys. I’ve tried to make the design more usable to all of us and more appealing. I’ve absolutely adored the main page layout of Douglas Bowman’s website, Stopdesign for years now. It allows for a lot of information on the page without having everything looking as if it was thrown everywhere, so I’ve organized the information on the main page similar to how he did it, but the design, programming, and usage of the website is very different.
This design was developed over a couple of months through many different ideas. Jeff played a bigger role in this site’s design and workings than he did in the last one. He threw criticisms at me from the perspective of an average user of the website and not a designer. The colors were chosen to make the website feel a lot more 19th century by having a sort of wood-like feel to it without having to use actual wood textures; to complement that I chose a serif font for the headers that’s quite old, Caslon. It’s not a 19th century typeface having been invented in 1734, but it does show its age and flair especially against the typical serif font choices for the web– Times and Georgia. It was widely used in the 19th century especially for body copy, so it does fit.
The website also contains some new content added with this update, namely three new gallery images. These are portraits created for us to use on the website for our portraits, but we’ve ended up using them as avatars and buddy icons for forums and instant messengers respectively as well.
We have also in the process moved to another host, Dreamhost. Our former host (which I will not mention because we have nothing against them at all) were getting behind. Other webhosts caught up to them and have surpassed them considerably in features and price. On our new host we have complete control over our own custom PHP install, allowing us to pick and choose what our PHP install supports and does not support. If this website will not use something we don’t include it in our compile. There’s no sense in its being there. This also ensures that we use the most up-to-date and stable version of PHP there is as well. Other things such as IMAP and Jabber This saves us money and you time. We spent several months on this design and made sure that it would work flawlessly when it was revealed, but we can’t assure that sort of action. If there are any bugs on the website we will try and remedy them as quickly as possible.
In other news I am in the process of moving. We are in the final stages of moving in now, so it shouldn’t be too much longer, but I will not be able to begin the next page until after I have moved and settled in. I’ll announce when I’ve moved and have begun. Just watch that progress bar at the top of the main page. We hope you enjoy the website. It’s been an educating experience for us to make this website. There might be an occasional bug here and there, but it’s finished. We’re anxious to begin the next page. ¡Hasta Luego!
