New Site Design

[NewsGuy]

Some of you may have noticed a new home page design.

This is the direction we're moving to graphically, but there is much more that will change in terms of improving the design, and adding some new features to the home page.

Consider today's home page redesign to be a first draft of a work in progress. The look-and-feel will be coming to the forum, as well in the next few days. It's just cosmetic mostly.

[Kenneth]

Nice design, but if I might be so bold as to ask why not go with W3C standards and get rid of all that bandwidth consuming table code? Seperation of presentation from content and all that stuff.

[NewsGuy]

Nice design, but if I might be so bold as to ask why not go with W3C standards and get rid of all that bandwidth consuming table code? Seperation of presentation from content and all that stuff.

Thanks.

W3C, meaning CSS instead of tables? Or do you mean XML?

[Kenneth]

Yes, using css for the way content is styled (in an external css file if possible) and using the <div> tag instead of table rows and cells. Because google and the like only dips so many bytes into the page when it indexes the content it's better to have as little non-content as possible in the page. Using W3C standards also allows for better portablity across different devices (hand held gagdets etc.) and makes the reading of the content easier for users who may have sight problems and rely on some sort of text to voice software. Whenever I am forced to use tables I try use them in a linear fashion without all that rowspan and cellspan stuff. But you're probably bound to a certain degree by the limitations of the forum application so you may not be able to standardise the forum section.

The good news is that even if you find you can't conform to W3C standards you may be getting enough hits that site popularity will give you good rankings.

edit: A thought just came to me, you probably know all the above and more already so apologies if my post is a case of teaching grandma to suck eggs.

[danholo]

It's a nice and refreshing change. The old and first designed lasted quite a bit. Or was it the first? The layout is clearer in my opinion. Good going.

[NewsGuy]

Yes, using css for the way content is styled (in an external css file if possible) and using the <div> tag instead of table rows and cells. Because google and the like only dips so many bytes into the page when it indexes the content it's better to have as little non-content as possible in the page. Using W3C standards also allows for better portablity across different devices (hand held gagdets etc.) and makes the reading of the content easier for users who may have sight problems and rely on some sort of text to voice software. Whenever I am forced to use tables I try use them in a linear fashion without all that rowspan and cellspan stuff. But you're probably bound to a certain degree by the limitations of the forum application so you may not be able to standardise the forum section.

The good news is that even if you find you can't conform to W3C standards you may be getting enough hits that site popularity will give you good rankings.

edit: A thought just came to me, you probably know all the above and more already so apologies if my post is a case of teaching grandma to suck eggs.
That's a pretty funny expression... :)

Yes, I used CSS, although I'm doing the include of the stylesheet on the server side, not referencing an external .css file. Maybe in the future I will.

I do use spans and divs as layout elements, but not for the overall page structure, because I've seen some problems with that from time to time. Tables are more flexible for "unexpected" content, which we do have, since we automatically pull in the latest posts.

But you do have good ideas, which are valid.

It's a nice and refreshing change. The old and first designed lasted quite a bit. Or was it the first? The layout is clearer in my opinion. Good going.

Thanks!