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Had another go with jquery. Last time I had tried to use the xml functions for ajax. It worked, kind of, but kept clearing my cookies resulting in needing a nasty workaround to restore them.

This time I was going for something less ambitious – my homepage has a text area that changes depending on which of four graphics your cursor is over. I wanted the text area to slide up, down, in or out or some similar ‘cool’ effect, instead of just switching over.

Got the jquery installed and figured out the jquery code to do this … nice and straightforward – 20 mins. But then trying to get it to work smoothly and in a neat manner … no! The text would slide in and out, but it just wouldn’t work cleanly. After 1 1/2 hours faffing I’d had enough. Looked through the demoes for doing this kind of thing – they were all a bit jerky and just not good enough.

So once again – I like the idea of jquery – but it doesn’t quite work … then there’s the problem if there’s anything wrong with the jquery code – you need to be a javascript master to touch it …

The reworking of the site continues … a new layout largely driven by increasing screen sizes and the requirement for sites to resize to work on many resolutions. Most of the photography on the site – over 1000 images was scanned at 300px high, and isn’t going to get rescanned in a hurry – the new design needs to take into account the fixed fairly small images but increasing screen space that site pages need to take up.

So after less than a year I find myself redesigning the photography part of the site, the design which I still quite like, though I’ve spent too much time working on it and am a bit fed up of the black and gray.

The rest of the site is done to the new layout – no loss on the design for that part of the site; the content has been culled, restructured and reprioritised – now the parts of the site that are going to get new content are more readily available. The whole site has one design, off one style sheet, with one master template; and while I’m not so happy with the new design it will be possible to modify the whole sites look easily and regularly as I get tired of it and feel it needs a refresh.

Still a couple of weeks before everythings done … but things are moving along nicely.

A last look at the old design before it disappears:

Added new photographs from the Bradford Carnival or “Lord Mayor’s Parade” in July 2009. Once again this was brilliant with some fantastic costumes and street dancing …

Also added a page to show some the web design/development I’ve done over the past few years. Hopefully will keep this up to date.

Have started planning a stock photography site, first attempts with oscommerce and then zencart total failures. These carts not appropriate to selling stock. It’s gonna have to be bespoke, hooked into paypal/Google payments I think. Of the big three: Corbis, Alamy & Getty, the Corbis site looks the nicest, but I reckon with some Ajax it wouldn’t be too hard to get close to it.

Rates:
c# : http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/csharp.do

css : http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contracts/uk/css.do

graphic design : http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contracts/uk/graphic%20design.do

Today, continuing the retrospective site homepage facelift: new feeds for top photography stories (by visits), top images viewed and recent stories from the blog

Useful table of web safe fonts here: http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html

Saw the martinruffe.co.uk/retrospective subsite on a new monitor today. The site looked tiny!! So a quick late night restyle was needed, and now at least it fills a 1000×800 ish screen. Still tiny on a large monitor, so sometime I suppose it will have to be modified to scale regardless of screen size. Not so easy when your site is largely image based.

Also friendly urls have gone in on this part of the site … we shall see if this has any affect on search engine rankings … it may but can’t imagine it will be huge … but who knows?