04 October 2007

New Site Style for TheDarkSighed

Written by Yours Truly ( )
Published on October 4th, 2007 @ 09:54:23 pm, using 383 words, 3870 views

Categories: Announcements [A]

I was browsing my favorite free stock photography site last weekend and found a few high-resolution images which, when viewed side by side in Photoshop, gave me immediate inspiration for a redesign of the main site pages of thedarksighed.com. I spent a few hours in Photoshop with several different layer blending techniques and some creative use of masking tools, then switched over to EditPad and put together a new layout for the main site.

I’ve set up the homepage to pull the latest RSS feeds from the blog and display them on the left side of the page. To the right of the RSS feeds I’ve inserted a condensed display of my most recent graphic design projects, though I’m still trying to figure out a way to have these pulled automatically from the blog rather than having to update them manually. As of now, I’ve only posted a few of my most recent photo-manipulations to the blog, though I have several in the queue, so that section of the homepage is so far limited to only the most recent designs.

The new site layout follows the design philosophy of the b2evolution blog templates I’ve recently been building. Like my recent blog skins, it’s designed for a 1024x768 monitor resolution. It makes use of valid XHTML Strict markup and valid CSS Stylesheets. Where necessary, the markup is XHTML Transitional, as in the contact form page, which uses a Captcha image. The Captcha no longer functions properly when constrained by the code requirements of XHTML Strict markup.

I’m considering building a blog template around the same design, simply to streamline as much of the site as possible, but that’s an endeavor which will have to be left for another day. Right now I’m working on bringing over as much of the old site into the new style, and finding little time to do so. I plan to keep working on the site move in my spare time over the next few days.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the new layout. Any feedback is appreciated…

This post is the creative work of Yours Truly and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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08 February 2005

Just getting started, bear with me ...

Written by Yours Truly ( )
Published on February 8th, 2005 @ 07:29:42 pm, using 163 words, 450 views

Categories: Announcements [A], News

It looks like Internet Explorer has trouble loading icons and graphics in the blog, and it's not reading a lot of the CSS properly. I'm not sure yet what the problem is. For now, use Firefox or Netscape, as they seem to work correctly. I'll see if I can fix the issue in the next few days...

UPDATE: The image issue in IE is fixed now (I missed a baseurl reference, doh!), but haven't had a chance to make the stylesheet work 100% with IE yet. the only thing remaining is the list-bullet vertical spacing)

UPDATE (06 March 2005): I've switched skins because I like kubrick better. Those of you familiar with kubrick will immediately recognize that I've tweaked it to the point where it's a different animal entirely. Right now the only problem I'm seeing is the vertical height of the list-item icons in IE. They seem to sit a little too high. Need to work on the line heights of list items in general.

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