Website remodeled

blog

I’ve been remodeling this website in last two weeks. It is really challenging to pursue the best user-experience, not technology, just the sense of beauty. It may take hours to find the most satisfying margin, padding and color scheme. Just post here for the record.

Fine tune the theme

The rtl theme was modified based upon Joe[y]‘s Yadda, a fixed-width-two-column WordPress theme. It was tailored to capitalize the wide screen since I listed the source code from time to time. The sidebar was moved from the left side to the right side for my personal taste.

I did not notice there was a big mistake of layout until yesterday, the #sidebar is composed by #main, instead of #content. This is legal, passing the XHTML validation, but not consistent to my original design, no wonder I had to put the sidebar explicitly using position: absolute. After the reorganizing the bug, the adjustHeight hack does not make sense any longer, so it is with the vertical separator.

Another pitfall is the #topbar, the tabs moved above the horizontal separator when text was zoomed in. After I assigned the horizontal separator to content’s border-top, and dropped the height by using padding, the tabs’ positions are managed by the layout engine automatically, and the #topbar works perfect.

Last but not the least, the color scheme. I love chic design, so I tried my best to use as few as possible colors in the whole site. I also stole the color pattern from Google Code for the #topbar

Advertisement management

To be honest, I never expect to get paid to cover my ISP expense. Well, it is not a big deal, I happened to catch the DreamHost’s 777 promotion and Globat’s FAR campaign. The Google Adsense advertisement is more or less a sign of profession. It collected very small amount of money every month. Once I got the payment, it would take at least 24 months or forever for the minimum payment, $100, I would drop it.

Eventually, I dropped the Firefox referral banner as I found most of my visitors were using Firefox. Lots of bloggers in 9rules are using Text link Ads, which is more like traditional banner, hopefully they can sell.

Miscellaneous fix

Thanks to Matthew’s report, I fixed the contact page. It may be interesting to AJAXize it later.

Update By using Yahoo’s YSlow for Firebug, I recognized a inaccessible background image in the CSS, removed. Scored A in YSlow by the way.

Update The favicon is generated via online favicon service, a mixture of Chinese calligraphy and English characters for my family name. Hope you enjoy it.