Hi Mike, > I can't contribute anything on the mac side, but I have to > say I like it. > I like the graphic device of using the fine white lines > across the page and > down. Nice effect. And the transparent effect in the > heading looks great > too. Very smooth.
Well, I'm just a lowly coder, but on behalf of the designer, thanks :) > I think it's a clever way to use boxes as wide as the whole > screen to overlay one colour over another so it looks like > there is a LOT more work in > the different sections than there actually is. Screen > background in the > dark red, then the middle wrapper box overlayed with the > olive colour, then the white lines through it looks like you > have a gazillion table cells there, but in fact there aren't any. Horizontal line work is actually quite simple with CSS. Just use top/bottom borders and wrapper divs that span the entire width of the page. Vertical line work (that spans the entire height) can usually only be done with background images. And become a right pain when dealing with fluid layouts in particular. > Can you tell us a bit about the design process? Did the > graphic designer start out with standards compliance in mind > or did you take the sketch/gif/PDF design or whatever and > force it into compliance? How much does your designer take > CSS techniques into account when designing? Well, to be honest, its been an on-going battle with the designers (which Mark Stanton and I are slowly winning). The bottom line I guess, is getting your designers to think in terms of "boxes". We try to educate our designers as much as possible as to what can be achieved with CSS. Once they get a grasp of the box model, they tend to design sites which are usually relatively easy to code for. Meaning very little input from us programmers during the design phase :) The biggest issues I come across are vertical repeating background images; images that span multiple "boxes" and content that requires mixed padding. Especially when a designer wants headings to begin inside a padding area. Always a pain in the rear as you then either need a single redundant div to contain the rest of the content (if we're talking about a H1) or setting up multiple rules for ALL the possible html elements (ugly). I must say one thing at this point, background images are your friend. It is WAY easier to achieve a complex *looking* site using background imagery than it is using inlines images and excess html/css. > The home page must have been a challenge - all those boxes to > line up. How will you keep them more or less in balance once > they start adding content to > it? Are you having a CMS back end on it? I've tested it with various amounts of content in all columns (nav and side bar included). It all works fine regardless of the amount of content. The amount of content really makes no difference since all columns are float:left and the footer set to clear:both. I think I threw in a <hr> or <br> with clear:both for good measure. As for a CMS, yes, it will be completely CMS driven. We're currently using ShadoMX built by our parters Straker (http://www.straker.co.nz/shado). Heres a couple of our other (largely) CSS based ShadoMX sites: http://www.ccfa.org.au/ http://www.thegeorgeinstitute.org/ </shameless_plug> > I know you're looking for html/css comments, but to tell the > truth, the site just looks brilliant in my browsers. If it > was my work I'd be telling > everyone in the world. Much appreciated :) Cheers, ____________________________ James Silva Web Production Gruden Pty Ltd Tel: +61 02 9956 6388 Fax: +61 02 9956 8433 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.gruden.com ____________________________ ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
