Introducing GuyWeb V5
You’re viewing the latest version of GuyWeb.co.uk which is very nearly complete. I’ve been working away on this for the last few months with the aim of making the site more usable to the various different audiences who read it. Here are my rough notes on the new design.
Firstly, the site should perform as an online portfolio of my work. I’ve got to make more of this feature and hope to add to it shortly.
Secondly, the site needs to present friends and family with recent photos from my exciting life.
Thirdly, it needs to have links to my thoughts and ramblings – articles. I’ve not written too much lately and although I hope to do more over the next year, it’s probably best not to put the main emphasis of the site on the ‘blog’ part.
Fourthly, I record interesting, relevant links daily using my del.icio.us account. These are now visible via the ‘recent links’ feature on the homepage as well as a daily digest in article format.
So, the homepage now introduces the site before presenting links to recent content and then links to all archived content.
The article pages themselves now make use of gravatars if you have one (incidentally, I’m still awaiting mine). The comments are now open for discussion by default.
Content-wise, I’m going through all the old posts to check the internal links which have been broken since the days of switching from Movable Type. The information-architecture will be fine-tuned, making use of good contextual-navigation.
As I say, the design is nealry done but there are some things I still need to do. For example, more graphics will be added, icons may change and I’ll also be listing all of the sites that have influenced this design.
The homepage should be looking like this:
If it doesn’t, you’re probably viewing it in a bad browser that doesn’t support web standards or W3C specification. For example, Internet Explorer on both PC and Mac (although it will just about display correctly on IE6/PC). It’s worth viewing it in Firefox or Opera on PC and Safari on the Mac. Browsing the web as a whole will be greatly imporved if you use a standards-compliant browser.
Here’s what it looks like in a bunch of good browsers on Windows:
GuyWeb v5 on Firefox 1.5
GuyWeb v5 on Internet Explorer 6
GuyWeb v5 on Opera 8
GuyWeb v5 on Sony PSP
GuyWeb v3 – how things used to look.
Feedback is encouraged so let rip..
Tags: Usability, Web design, Wordpress
Incidentally, I’m quite interested to know how this looks in Mac browsers like Safari and IE. The festive season means I’m unable to do full testing but the design is fairly simple.
December 27th, 2005 at 10:40 am
Fantastiche, my man. It looks the don. Love the visited link star thingy. I can tell you about IE5/mac, the structure of the homepage is lost (columns folding underneath etc) but your individual entry pages are fine. But who uses IE5/mac anyway? (except me)
December 28th, 2005 at 10:16 am
Hi Stephen, glad you like it. I already knew it’d look bad on IE5/mac since it uses floats that don’t have defined widths and relative positioning on the topbar – redering it useless to people using that browser. I’m gonna have to implement some hacks to take care of it.
Further reading here: http://www.l-c-n.com/IE5tests/float2misc/
I’m debating how to add comment notification that comment activity is happening – either on the homepage or by e-mail. Any ideas?
December 28th, 2005 at 10:20 am
Just testing the gravatars on my work e-mail address.
December 28th, 2005 at 10:40 am
Great, gravatars work.
December 28th, 2005 at 10:42 am
Just have a ‘recent comments’ thing under your recent links on the homepage.
http://blog.jodies.de/archiv/2004/11/13/recent-comments/
What tag did you use to display your last however many articles, on the homepage?
December 28th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
Thanks Stephen, that’s great. I used some query-based wp tags to display the last x amount of articles. All this info can be found in the WP Codex (relating to ‘the loop’): http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop
December 28th, 2005 at 6:24 pm