Re: website facelift

Alan Horkan wrote:

> First off I'll say it looks quite nice, the simplicity and clarity is
> good.
>
> However I loathe frames (you seem to be using div but the effect is
> similar). Hopefully you used frames only for demonstration and did not
> intend to use them in the real version where server side includes would be
> avialable.

These are not frames. There is a DIV that stays positioned as the page
is scrolled. The effect is similar navigation and display-wise, but it
doesn't have any of the issues that made frames a poor layout choice.
Forward/Back still works as expected. Bookmarks work as expected.
Search engines will index it as expected. It's just a single HTML page.

> I'm occasionally stuck with a very slow connection and Abiword does appeal
> to users with very old crappy hardware so I hope the site wont become too
> heavy.

Other than that immense AbiWord 3.5 image (that weighs in at over 60KB)
the pages are about the same weight size-wise. It should probably be
replaced with a much lighter-weight image. We could reduce the size wih
an optimized JPG (down to 30KB) but any further and it will degrade:

http://johnhaller.com/jh/temp/abisplash.jpg

I'd also recommend making it printer-friendly. Add the following CSS:

/*printer styles*/
@media print{
     #content{
         width:100%;
         margin:0;
         padding:0;
     }
     #content p{
         margin:0;
     }
     #sidebar{
         display:none;
     }
}

To get a feel for what this does, print preview this page:
http://johnhaller.com/jh/development/

Regards,
John
Received on Mon Jan 9 16:31:30 2006