Major Change in Site Look!

I started tinkering with it last night, and anyone who’s been here in the last 24 hours or so would’ve definitely known I was up to something. At different times throughout the day, things would’ve been very difficult (if not impossible) to read or decipher…for anyone who happened by here during this time, my apologies go out to you.

The major changes you’ll notice:

• Solid, concrete look to all portions of a page
  • I brought together the sidebar with the top navigation bar and also with the lower information bar.
  • Three sides of the page are outlined in the maroon color of this scheme. I felt this was good to ‘tie together’ all of the (formerly somewhat separate and confusing) bits of the page.
• Color Scheme
  • I made some minor changes to how links are colored (and how they behave)
  • I also adjusted header/footer text to contrast with the new maroon background

For those who don’t understand how the TWiki operates, pages are essentially split into three parts

1. header (the part with my head shot, telling you where you are),
2. text (this stuff you read), and
3. footer (the bit with the copyright information at the bottom)

The software dynamically creates the header and footer for each page, and to some extent (depending upon the user) can dynamically create the text portion as well. When I edit a page here, I only adjust the portion contained in text.

However, for this site, I’ve got the following individual page bits:

1. header (customized from stock TWiki look),
2. sidebar (a separate page I edit to modify links on the left side of the page),
3. text (regular editable content),
4. lower navbar (the list of links at the bottom of the page (stuff with the devil image)), and
5. footer (also slightly customized from stock TWiki look)

Thanks to the invention of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and TWikiSkins, I can really customize how an entire web looks. Better yet, once that’s been done, I can easily change how the whole thing looks in the event I need a new color scheme or something. Since I’ve essentially split up the TEXT portion (see above for definition) into three individual pages, I can easily edit the navigation parts separately and have them go into effect site-wide immediately.

As all the changes I’ve made are on a template/general level, I haven’t (and don’t plan to in the near future) tested individual pages for compliance. Since they’re all generated in the same way, my changes (as long as they worked on one page) should be in effect site-wide now. The only pages which might not be perfect would include the search pages (it uses a different template)…but there again I checked it…and it seems to look like everything else…

With that said, if you notice anything particularly strange or bad, please let me know about it! Thanks, and enjoy!

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/20/07