SIFT THIS -- Moving into the third year of the Digest, I found the layout of the site growing stale. Not once did someone ask, "What the hell is up with the logo? What do dice have to do with bits?" The answer is: I don't know. Probably something about the black'n'white binary coloring of the dice, but the bottom line was that our logo was borderline meaningless.
The first step in the revitalization of the site was the acquisition of a quality logo. After a weekend of fumbling around with Photoshop and Illustration, I decided to get the logo done professionally. Enter Toby Braun Information Design . Toby and I have never met. The only reason I even knew of his firm was due to a lucky AltaVista search for a HAL9000 artwork. (Check out Toby's HAL900 emulator… better yet, get all your graphic design needs fulfilled and make him a rich man.)
With the beginnings of a logo in hand, it was time to rethink the layout of our articles. While I've always been a big proponent of the multi-column tag, it has yet to find a comfortable place on we
b pages. In our case, readers needed to not only scroll down to continue reading, but also scroll up when they reached the end of a column #1. This never made any sense and is evidence of my desire to always stay on the cutting edge with little regard for the consequences. Sorry. The new single column layout will make reading Digest columns much easier.
- The Index and Archive portions of the site have changed and are still available in the table of contents frame to the left. I'd consider the layout of the pages a work in progress as the current set-up doesn't handle the large amount of information in an intelligent fashion.
- JavaScript makes it's subtle debut in our table of contents. You'll notice that moving the mouse over the links cause an arrow to appear as well as a message in the status bar. This was done with little code (see for yourself) and furthered the idea that the next great language may very well be JavaScript, not Java. (More on this idea next week)
- I find frames to be a excellent way to not only dress-up a site, but always a clean way to implement navigation. In the new layout, I've continued with heavy use of frames. As frames are 3.0 feature of browsers, this may limit my readership to 85% of the market, but a web surfer with a pre3.0 browser isn't likely to get much out of the Digest anyhow.
- Past issues of the Digest retain our old layout style. Unfortunately, they weren't designed with templates in mind so a redesign of the 50+ columns just isn't worth it. Regardless, they plug into the new layout nicely and all the navigational links should work as before.
Other minor design notes:
As always, I'd appreciate comments regarding the new layout. If something looks broken, it probably is. I've tested the site against Netscape 4.0x and IE 4.0x that probably means they may need to be some 3.0x browser retrofitting. Alas.
feb. 13, 1998