The frontpage has been redone into a new design using CSS to position the sidebars. There’s a few bugs to work out (particularly in Internet Explorer) but hopefully they’ll get worked out in a few days and then I’ll extend the design to the rest of the site.
Some good sites I’ve been looking at for the redesign include:
* “(extlink)Gnuhaus”:http://gnuhaus.com/iblog/nn4_3col_header.html
* “(extlink)W3C”:http://www.w3c.com
* “(extlink)A List Apart”:http://www.alistapart.com
It’s actually harder a task than it fist seemed, since different browsers support CSS in different ways, particularly when dealing with margins/padding and floated divs. My design looked good in “(extlink)Mozilla”:http://www.mozilla.org and “(extlink)Safari”:http://www.apple.com/safari but then died in Internet Explorer. Since IE is used by 95% of the web, I’ve had to modify my layout significantly.
Also, originally I attempted to define the site using as few extra divs and other elements, trying to apply formatting only to existing tags. It ended up making everything much more complicated, and I’ve since gone towards more divs for at least the primary document sections (header, sidebars, footer, etc.) Right now it looks pretty good everywhere except some of the horizontal spacing seems to be a little off… There’s a small horizontal scrollbar I can’t get rid of, and I have the right sidebar positioned in terms of percentages, not pixels (the bar’s only 200px wide) like I would prefer.