Hi all,
Thanks for all the comments on the new ABC home page. I did the front-end
coding, so I'm responsible for *some* of the issues raised.
The resizing thing:
I would have also preferred a scalable layout or a stylesheet switch, but the
design differences are sufficiently great that I had to build 2 html pages.
They are pulling different includes, in a different order for a start. I tested
the script pretty extensively, but if you have problems, email me and I'll look
into it.
The ABC (the New Media department anyway) is moving generally towards
fixed-width centered layouts. Again, not my preference.
Navigation:
The previous drop-down menus didn't test very well, and the click-through stats
showed the in-page links were used much more. The new global nav and the
"Explore the ABC" were quite popular.
The global nav coding was constrained by the fact that it has to go on all ABC
pages as a single include file. Putting the style tag in the include (and so
inside the body) was a compromise to get it to work without having to edit code
across the whole of the ABC. We are fixing it for the new/recent pages soon.
Old pages was will probably stay broken.
The Banner:
Making it an html image instead of a CSS background was done so the banner
appears in CSS impaired browsers and in PDAs where the rest of the page will be
unstyled.
Font-sizing:
Constant source of argument with designers, who always want it too small. Up to
now I've been using the body {font-size:0.76em} trick (most of the recent ABC
TV sites for example.) But the differences in IE when browser text size
settings become much too great. So I've started using font-size:76% instead,
which seems to work better.
Accessibility:
We haven't paid a lot of attention to it apart from making sure the html is
clean/semantic and adding the skip links. we test pretty widely across
browsers. Point taken about the missing title attributes, but given the number
of links, and the fact they come from some many different people in different
program areas, it is probably not going to get fixed.
BTW, if there is anything that particularly annoys (or pleases) you, send
feedback via the contact form if you want it formally logged. We do make
changes based on feedback we receive.
cheers,
Geoff Pack
Developer,
ABC New Media and Digital Services
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