Week 6
27/10/08
Bollocks to this....
After last weeks lecture I set about trying to tidy up my source code and put right any of the things that Chris and Nicolas had mentioned. I also changed my class names to something a bit more relative rather than just a number.
Valid Html
I tried to validate my pages this week but found that due to the inclusion of my dynamic content the pages had so many errors that were out of my control. I'm not sure if there is any way around these problems but not much I can do about them at the minute so for now I'll keep the flicker and delicious content in.
The only page that validates so far is my main index page. I guess that's a start.
Good Structure
Web Developer
I also installed the web developer’s toolbar on my laptop. I can’t believe I wasn’t using this a long time ago. It has so many useful features that I didn’t know were available. I’ve been using it on sites that interest me to break down the div layout and CSS files. I recommend it to anyone who doesn’t already have it installed.
Outline
I took a look at the outline of my own site and found that I have a pretty good hierarchy of various H1, H2’s and H3’s. A good structure is a key part of good mark-up so worth looking at it if you already don’t.
Spring Cleaning
Blockquotes
Apart from trying to tidy up my blog I also changed it a bit as I felt it wasn’t looking to hot. I started by changing any quotes I had in my pages. Using the Web Standards Solution book I styled any block quotes using CSS. They finished result looks a lot better than just plain text with an indent. It's done using 3 simple gifs and a bit of CSS code.
New Header & Footer
I changed the name at the top of my blog using Illustrator and gave it the sketchy effect you can see it has. It looks a lot nicer than the block of solid white text I had before. I'm trying to use Illustrator now for things like typography to get into the habit of using rather than Photoshop. I've also made the footer look a bit more like grass using a fancy brush tool. Looks pretty fancy now.
CSS Sprites
I mentioned in one of the earlier weeks about using Dreamweaver’s built in rollover function and the amount of unnecessary preloading code it puts into your pages. I used an article on ‘A List Apart’ and have finally got round to using CSS to control any image rollovers that I have that were previously using the Dreamweaver code. I took a bit of time to get the images correct but now it’s working on my week 1 page.
