Colin's Journal

I’ve uploaded the new “Autumn” design for my website. If you’ve any opinion on this new design please let me know, I’ve been staring at it too long to know whether I still like it. I had envisaged something more complex, but as I got into the design I kept coming across good reasons not to add more elements. This design follows the trend of earlier designs by putting a great deal of value on white-space. Most commercially designed websites have a narrow column of content among lots of design elements – something I may try next time.

I encountered numerous difficulties implementing this design in such a way that it works in all of the major web browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari). Issues ranged from known IE CSS bugs (particularly the double margin bug) through to weird box stacking in Safari.

My new design is fairly simple and yet it took three different approaches before I managed to get something that worked across the four browsers that I’m testing. If I had used absolute positioning on everything it would have been fairly easy, but it would have scaled badly for anyone using a large font size. I’ve had to use some CSS hacks (see “The Box Model Problem”) to make the site legible, although not correct, in IE 5.0/5.5.

Only around 3% of visitors to owlfish.com use IE 5.0 and hopefully by the time I create my next design there will be almost no-one using this browser.

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