Over the past couple days I’ve been redesigning my website.First, I made a design for my website in Illustrator that I’m happy with. What’s better is that I was able to implement it fully in a matter of minutes because of the clean template structure I used previously. I had wanted for some time to add some flare to the site, but not to do too much, since I would never want to detract from the content. I hope this design is successful, I don’t think it’s too flashy. Please let me know what you think. Next, I made a lot of minor appearance changes and cleaned up a good amount of the code, fixing up a few sections that had had minor bugs for some time. This is mostly done, but I’m still not happy with the video playback JavaScript. It works fine in FireFox but InternetExplorer shows an error if the video is played, stopped and then replayed. I’m certain the error lies in how I re-call the image after the video playback, but I can’t seem to find a way to src a subfolder within the InnerHTML tag. Hopefully I’ll figure it out soon.
In the interest of SEO, I am inserting hierarchical header tags in my individual pages so that Google can track each individual page more accurately, and changing the titles to reflect the page content rather than the general site content. I altered the CSS structure pretty substantially to accomodate the new header tags and to use them rather than classes for the styling. All in all the changes have actually reduced the file size of the site, while making the code more effective and the styles easier to edit. My site’s redesign is practically finished, although there are still a few loose ends.
Jon Raasch is a UX nerd and free-lance web designer / developer who loves jQuery, Javascript & CSS.
