July 29, 2004
Tabulas
Ah, the joys of the Tabulas front page. Instead of finishing the community search feature, I've been focused lately on fixing up the front part of Tabulas.com (the main front page).
The problems with the Tabulas front page:
1.) It's old and I don't like it.
2.) The markup is horrid. It's a hodgepodge of when I was transitioning from tables to CSS, and it shows in the nasty source code. The HTML is bloated and needs to be streamlined with some solid CSS.
3.) There are far too many links along the top bar. Many of the links were retroactively removed, so they are dead pages. In essence, that whole navigation scheme is dead.
Ideally there should be as a few number of links as possible to allow people to quickly navigate through the front page.
Right now I have only four "nav" links on the main page: "home", "features", "about", "contact."
4.) The backend scripting handling user creation/password resending/logging in is not very "user friendly." Logging in fails you without really giving you a good error message. I need to make the whole area "idiot-proof" by offering explantatory error messages (duh factor here).
5.) There is no benefit in logging in and viewing the front page. It would be quite nice if some of the subheading areas showed member-relevant topics, like "How to upgrade your account" or "How to get help."
6.) The PHP scripting, to say, is worse than the HTML markup. Which says a lot.
So I ended up redesigning the front page ... aesthetically it's not too different, but the markup was completely redone. The whole thing is powered by CSS, although the markup still isn't 100% semantically correct. I tried to use variable font sizes as much as possible, but it screwed with the design. So there is still work that can be done in the future, but for now I'm quite happy with the results.
(In case it's not clear, I *have* created it and *implemented* the front page, along with a slightly changed caching script, but I'm going to complete the whole shebang (logging in, registering, info on Tabulas, etc.) before I link it. But as usual, those of you on my friends link will receive the link a few days before it goes live to help me test it out 8)
The problems with the Tabulas front page:
1.) It's old and I don't like it.
2.) The markup is horrid. It's a hodgepodge of when I was transitioning from tables to CSS, and it shows in the nasty source code. The HTML is bloated and needs to be streamlined with some solid CSS.
3.) There are far too many links along the top bar. Many of the links were retroactively removed, so they are dead pages. In essence, that whole navigation scheme is dead.
Ideally there should be as a few number of links as possible to allow people to quickly navigate through the front page.
Right now I have only four "nav" links on the main page: "home", "features", "about", "contact."
4.) The backend scripting handling user creation/password resending/logging in is not very "user friendly." Logging in fails you without really giving you a good error message. I need to make the whole area "idiot-proof" by offering explantatory error messages (duh factor here).
5.) There is no benefit in logging in and viewing the front page. It would be quite nice if some of the subheading areas showed member-relevant topics, like "How to upgrade your account" or "How to get help."
6.) The PHP scripting, to say, is worse than the HTML markup. Which says a lot.
So I ended up redesigning the front page ... aesthetically it's not too different, but the markup was completely redone. The whole thing is powered by CSS, although the markup still isn't 100% semantically correct. I tried to use variable font sizes as much as possible, but it screwed with the design. So there is still work that can be done in the future, but for now I'm quite happy with the results.
(In case it's not clear, I *have* created it and *implemented* the front page, along with a slightly changed caching script, but I'm going to complete the whole shebang (logging in, registering, info on Tabulas, etc.) before I link it. But as usual, those of you on my friends link will receive the link a few days before it goes live to help me test it out 8)
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benwebber
Ooh, I can\'t wait for the standards-compliant version.