Website : Having sat on it for a few days...

posted 2008.10.28 at 12:12

... it's now a question of "how much bling in the gui."

By which I mean, how graphically intense do I want to make the site?

It's one thing to be serving up around 400+ 600x900 jpegs; another to blam an additional ream of smaller files - most of which would stay cached with every page load. Obviously, the more graphically intense the site the longer it'll take to produce and the longer it'll take to debug. That isn't the big issue here - the big issue is just how much space do I want to give over to Stuff What Isn't Actually Content (meaning words, navigation, comic pages, etc).

Space is something web developers don't seem to give a ghost of a shit about these days. Me, I hate scrolling through a pile of whatever to get to a strip or article or comic page or whatever - and I've tried to implement accordingly. Not that there aren't certain insurmountables, but back when ATC was just The Dualist, navigation worked pretty damned reasonably and, in my opinion, was a hell of a lot cleaner and easier to use than most other webcomics.

Then DCR and TV got loaded in and blew that all to hell.

Core navigation isn't going to change much. I aim to make it Better in all the areas I know it needs to be Made Better in. Barring some ginormous flash of insight, I think I have most of the kinks worked out on paper - meaning the bottleneck is now the site design itself. How much bling, etc.

Aesthetically I'm waffling between Some Kind Of Overblown Thing and a reimplementation of the existing design, tweaked wider to allow for a couple of major-major design changes. Width is the one thing that's going to change, no bones about it - the old sidebar is a very fixed 147 pixels wide - that'll be moving to a fixed 150 or 160. Probably 160, as it's the width of those fucking annoying vertical flash ads you see there if you run Gloriously Unfiltered Internets (xeno : you're not missing anything).

760 base content - the old site is 760 with buffers, so the new site will probably be between 780 and 800 wide, depending on bling.

Foreshadowing : There may come a day when I actually run ads on this site. I've threatened it for years, but given my continually deteriorating financial situation, it's pretty clear that I've got to make some kind of effort to turn my biggest timesink into some kind of earner.

No Surprise : The pending version of the site will continue to use all of the Bad Old HTML Crap that web developers have been pissing and moaning about for years. Tables. Javascript. CSS for text display only. I know how to work it that way, it works in IE6 (still a concern - though Navigator 4.x, thankfully, isn't), and I figure I'll have more than enough to do re-learning the CMS.... something I'm still grappling with.