design.Principles, an reh3.com resource providing web design and development news, has received a facelift and is now powered by WordPress 1.5. In the following notes I’ll outline the details, hopefully without boring you all to death.

Why The Redesign

When the site turned one year old this past January, I started to get that familiar itch that many of us have gotten when our site has had the same look and feel for a while. I began playing with several layouts and for some reason or another settled on this one. Now to set the record straight, I loved the previous layout, but unfortunately had grown bored with it and the antiquated method for updating it. I am not 100% comfortable with the new look, but this is how I generally feel after publishing any redesign.

Along with the redesign of the layout, I wanted to improve (read “make my life easier�) the method with which it was updated. After toying with WordPress on a small project that I launched a couple of months ago, I decided that it was the choice to once again employ. Installing the system is a breeze, and the new “Pages� feature is a god-send.

That said, I did have some issues moving over my older content to the new layout and system. Fortunately the “Pages� system allowed me to build a one off, updatable page specifically for it. So if you ever need to find a link that has been posted in the past it’s available here and via a link in the “Archives� section.

Content

The overall content philosophy of the site will remain intact. I want to keep the news “portal� aspect of the site, but also want to take advantage of the new updating system. Periodically, I’ll post some of my own experiences with CSS instead of always relying on others to write what I often experience myself in web design and development.

A side-note on the content. The old RSS link is no longer valid. So if you did not see the last update in that feed, you can subscribe to the new one here.

Commenting Disabled (for now)

I haven’t decided yet if I want to implement commenting on the site. On one hand it would be great to hear from you all in regard to any issues to a technique or news item I may report, but I’m also not too keen on comment spam. I know that there are tools and plugins available to deal with it, but I’m not sure that I want to deal with that just yet. So for the time being there will be no commenting on the site.

The Flash

The Featured Site highlight is power by flash, but was originally slated to use a JS fade in script that I employed on the corporate site. After thinking about it for a bit, I threw caution to the wind and went the Flash route instead. What can I say, I’m silly like that.

More than any thing else, I just wanted to play with it. I had used deconcept’s flash detection and embedding script with great success in the past and implemented it here as well with little problem.

Buh-bye IE5.5

With less that 2% of the site’s visitors using Internet Explorer 5/5.5 on Windows, I decided that I would discontinue support for it. To tell you the truth I haven’t even looked at the site in that particular browser yet, so I may have gotten lucky and it renders properly, but I doubt it. I’m not that lucky.

Issues and Changes

As with any redesign, this one has some issues. There is an interesting float problem in Safari and a couple of quirks that need fixing in some other browsers, but those will be ironed out shortly. You may also see some changes to come in the near future as I get used to the site. Nothing is ever 100% completed and this site will grow and evolve as needed to suit the readers and myself.

Well, that’s probably the longest post that has yet to ever grace this site. I look forward to working with the new format and hope you all enjoy it just as much. Thanks.