This is Aq10, the 10th design for Aquarionics since… well, since I started numbering them. It was designed with the following ideals in mind:

  1. It should look nice
  2. It should have somewhere I can muck around with for temporal-designs
  3. It should be cleaner than the old design
  4. It should validate
  1. It should display the content first.

    Of which I have failed number 4, and suceeded with the rest to my satisfaction.

    1 – It should look nice

    Well, I like it.

    2 – Temporal Designs

    The banner at the top and the clean stylesheet means I can do christmas, birthday, easter, spring, summer, autumn, winter, solstice and sunrise designs at will.

    3 – Clean

    The old design put too much on the front page, which I’ve fixed.

    4 – Validate

    One of the problems (see below) is the lack of navigation near the top, so I quickly put a way to always go to the front page by making the banner a link, which – since divs cannot be in anchors – isn’t valid HTML4. I will probably either turn the banner to an anchor (from a div) or just leave it invalid until I get better navigation in place.

    5 – Content Is King

    The structure of the HTML document is as follows:

    • header
    • content
    • navigation
    • page navigation (right)
  • section navigation (left)

    The CSS then indents the content either side and then absolutely positions the menus to the left and right of that, relitive to the left and right. This provides an “elastic” design, where the navigation is a fixed width and the content expands and collapses to fill the gap between them. The resulting HTML page means that text, mobile, and non-CSS browsers are presented with the content without having to wade though six folds of navigation first, which was a problem with the previous design.

    Problems

    The main one is the main navigation, which has been relegated to the very end of the page. Unlike jish.nu, which is where the inspiration for the clean design came from, I have more current content on the site than just the weblog, and whilst lots of that will be ofloaded to another set of sites soon, the gallery, articles and writings will remain, and should be linked to as well as the journal, not to mention the lack of navigation from the rest of the site to the front page.

    I’m looking at ways to fix that, of which the best – probably – is a set of horizontal links below the banner. But right now I’m at work, so I’ll fix that when I get home.

    New

    The only new thing in the design is at the very bottom of every page, which gives you a link to the PHP code that generated it.

    Comments? Complaints?