New Templates Offer Design Consistency
A short bustle last night and yesterday has involved rolling out the newer versions of my photography weblog, now called An Hour after Closing: Photographic Glimpses from Steven Clark, and my drawing weblog, now called Sketches on a Bamboo: Infrequent Drawings from Steven Clark. This is a very simple roll-out of the Nortypig redesign that I wrote about in yesterday’s post titled Nortypig Template and CSS Rebuild with site specific changes to simple width dimensions and layout. I’ll also be opening the posts on An Hour after Closing and Sketches on a Bamboo later this afternoon so feel free to comment politely and constructively on anything you see there.
What this roll-out enables me to achieve is a consistency of design. While each involves some very minor changes to the layout and particularly width, with a new image for the header, everything else is packaged in a consistent bundle. The print stylesheets work out of the box, for example. Each site shares the exact same typographical features such as fonts, line heights and rhythm important for consistency of brand. Each site uses the exact same set of visual elements if the header image is ignored.
And each site now only has a 4Kb sitewide stylesheet (other stylesheets add up to less than 2KB on top) as opposed to the original 16KB stylesheet which had been the result of previously hijacking a default theme to do the work. In the end, writing from the ground up not only saves me bandwidth and improves speed but ultimately makes for an easier to edit stylesheet without all the extraneous time sinks associated with other people’s logic. Finesse of the finer points of the cascade aren’t required to locate where an edit needs to take place. I’ve also changed recently from a vertical sprawling stylesheet design to a horizontal structured approach which goes for redundancy rather than requiring the coder to figure anything out themselves. One selector and one set of associated rules.
Another up side to this strategy is, like most web standards authors, I tend to markup my pages in the same way every single time. My divs have a consistency in naming that allows this to be rolled out in other solutions very fast and without fuss. I’ve been quite slack in the past about my software process of web design but that will be a trait of previous years and not this one I can assure you.
Next stop is to roll it out onto this site and redraw this design using the new templates. Hopefully I’ll get it done sometime this week and nobody will know the difference.
