Topic: WordPress and Web Programming
Tags: Web Design, WordPress
I’ve redesigned toppa.com to support my web consulting work. How do you like the logo?
Other than the new look, the big change is that I’ve split my blog in two. Posts that show up on the home page concern web technology and my projects. Everything else is still on the site, but is in my personal blog. There’s also a link for it at the bottom of the sidebar.
For my RSS fanbase (yes, I’m trying to be funny…), you can get all my posts from this feed, or just the personal blog posts from this one.
Under the hood it’s still one blog. Figuring out how to get WordPress to display everything as if it were two blogs was an interesting challenge (one that has frustrated a number of people, judging by the threads in the WordPress support forums). It’s not just a question of limiting the topic categories that show up on the home page. It’s also a question of how to group the other categories together, and how to get the sidebar to show the appropriate navigation controls for the current context (i.e. listing the correct subset of categories on the home page, as well as on each different category archive page). I’ll write up a how-to post soon.
Update: I’ve redesigned again since writing this post, so I’ve removed the links that are no longer valid.
Topic: WordPress and Web Programming
Tags: CSS, Web Design
New design, with drop down menus
If you do a Google search for “CSS drop down menu”, you’ll find a number of examples that have been provided by well meaning folks. I wasted a lot of time with them. With only one exception, they were either:
- Poorly modularized, in that if I included their stylesheet and javascript files, and then dropped their menu markup inside a div in my design, my page would explode into a million pieces, or
- They relied on 100+ lines of javascript, which seems really unnecessary in the age of CSS (except for IE’s lack of CSS support for hovering with anything other than an anchor tag), or
- If I scrolled through the submenu items, the hover color on the top menu item would disappear, resulting in a goofy menu display (that’s a problem most don’t know how to solve without javascript though, including me).
The one exception was the CSS Express Drop Down Menu, which was the seventh or eighth one I tried. It has only one small javascript function (to patch the IE hover problem), the xhtml and css aren’t unnecessarily complicated, and the css is very well documented. It even includes special handling for the notorious IE5 for Mac. After dropping in the code, I just had to spend about 20 minutes tweaking the css for fonts, colors, and padding to fit my design, and now I’m good to go. If you’re looking for a good CSS drop down menu, this is the one to use!
Topic: WordPress and Web Programming
Tags: Web Design, WordPress
The new design I’m working on for toppa.com
I’ve been busy working on a new design for toppa.com - this is a screenshot of it. My site is cluttered with a ton of links that really are more distraction than anything else. My design is inspired by the simple and clean open source “Cash” design. As you can see, I want to go even simpler (the CSS for Cash is also needlessly complicated, so I simplified that too). I’ve been using a lot more photographs in my posts over the past year, so I want to maximize the available width for pictures, but still be friendly to low-res monitors. Put all that together, and it means the sidebar has to go.
One part I still have to work on is rollover menus for the top navigation. The header area can be overlaid with a tag cloud, blogroll, etc. if someone wants to look at them. Otherwise, they’re neatly hidden away. After that I need to convert it into a WordPress theme, but I think that part will be easy.
Let me know what you think. If there’s any interest I’ll be happy to make a downloadable version - just leave me a comment.
Topic: WordPress and Web Programming
Tags: Blogging, Web Design
As you can see, I’ve moved my blog to the top of the site. The blog is the only part of my site that isn’t gathering dust, so I thought it made sense to move it up. I’m still fond of the old toppa.com home page, but it’s about 10 years old now, and it’s time to move on. It shall be forever memorialized here, with these screenshots:
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Topic: WordPress and Web Programming
Tags: Web Design
The new design is in place. After all the work I’ve put into it, now I can’t decide if it’s cool or just horrible. I’ve looked at it for too long, and now I’ve lost my sense of perspective. Is it yucky hot dogs and mustard, or is it retro Soviet-imagery-became-cool-once-we-were-no-longer-afraid-of-them? If you’re reading this, I’m sure you have an opinion - please click the Comments link and let me know what you think!
Topic: WordPress and Web Programming
Tags: Web Design
Redesign in progress: please shield your eyes or wear sunglasses while I sort this out.
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