I went to go and fix the menu on The Well’s website late last night and ended up pretty much giving the entire site a face lift. So, what started as a 10 minute project turned into a two and a half hour late-night redesign.
The beauty of the process was that with CSSEdit (a program I am growing to love) I was able to change the CSS and see the changes live on my machine with their preview feature. Then I just uploaded the new stylesheet and changed everything over all at once. I really didn’t touch the xhtml except for a few minor validation problems I found.
Some of the major changes:
- New Menu: I finally fixed the menu that had some major spacing issues and was hard to see. As I said, this is what started this 2:30am project.
- Wider: I widened the site from 800px to 900px. I feel like this gives it some more breathing room and with the wide screen moniters out there it feels better on those too.
- New Header: Changed the Header image (and made it a tad bigger): I loved the flower that we had for the past few years but it needed a change. And no, there is not a bamboo garden in our backyard. I chose this because I was looking for an image that was green and projected life in some way. Regardless, my plan is to have that header image be a rotating image (meaning that it will change on each page visited)
- Text: I made all kinds of text changes. The headings are now stronger and the font is now good old Helvetica.
- Subpages: Finally tightened up all the subpages, comments, lists, columns, etc. so they are not a little easier to read and digest.
- I am sure I did more…but i forget what else… it was late…
If you see anything I missed let me know. I’d love to hear your impressions…
Of course, as I was going through the site I realized that I need to spend some time updating the content. Its been a while since I have and with the rate that things change and morph around The Well, some of that info is out of date. I guess that is for another late night…
It went from this:
to this…
