Views from Medina Road

Thursday, August 14, 2008

New Skin

A note on the still-in-progress refinement of Locus Online's look and structure -- I've pretty much finished layout and graphics for the homepage, and for the template post page, which tonight I've used to set the latest New Books page. At the moment the new homepage is posted here, current as of tonight, and all I'd have to do is rename this page to 'index.html' to replace the oldstyle homepage (today's capture now linked from the Site Map) to completely change over...

What's left to do is create new archive pages that align with the newly imposed structure for organizing the site: news, reviews, resources, perspectives. Until now there's been an alignment distinguishing material original to the website from material taken from Locus Magazine, and the new order ignores that, putting all news in one area, all reviews together, and so on. The traditional archive pages don't quite align; and they should reflect the new homepage graphics. Should I post the new homepage even though the archive pages aren't ready yet? Hmm...

Well, why not. I've invited comments to the in-progress redesign twice in the past month, and gotten only two or three; perhaps more will appear once everyone sees it.

5 comments 9:42 PM

Comments:

I'm loving the new design. I may not comment or send in emails of encouragement but your hard work is definitely appreciated. Keep up the great work.

# posted by

Anonymous : 6:52 PM

The RSS feed's link to this post had an extra http://www.locusmag/ in front of it.

The font's too small. (Since I read the feed, that doesn't affect me as much, but is still a bad idea, IMHO.)

Other than that, it's looking good!

Kendall, LOCUS subscriber

# posted by

Kendall : 7:31 PM

Mark,

Like the new skin. Clean, easy to read, good subdued colors. Especially like the fly-out menus in the upper left hand side for news, etc., and have always loved the Blinks.

Would be great, if eventually we could get archived book reviews from the print magazine.

Your site is a daily stop for me.
Regards,
Jeff

# posted by

Anonymous : 7:57 PM

It looks great in Firefox on the Mac, but the default font in Safari appears small and pixelated.

Thanks for a spot to post comments.

# posted by

Anders Monsen : 7:34 PM

Looks good Mark! Though it took me a while to find your blog. :)

- John

John O'Neill
Black Gate

# posted by

Anonymous : 9:36 PM