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Improving Interlopers - Part 1

Recently I underwent the huge task of re-writing all the front-end code for Interlopers and improving the site design as well. It was a lot of work and also a lot of fun so I thought I might share some aspects of the process.

I’ve known for a while that I wanted to spruce up the look and feel of Interlopers and if it wasn’t a total re-design then it would certainly be a modification of what was there already. I originally wrote the front end code for the site quite some time ago and as with all skill-sets like mine, we improve vastly and look back on previously good work and cringe.

How much to change

Having re-designed Interlopers a few times before I know the kind of upset it can cause to the community. Even if you are improving the site you can be sure that most of your userbase will not like the change (just look at the recent Facebook backlash) so the first thing I decided to do was test opinion with a forum thread.

I think it’s important to include the users in such a process as they are the ones that make your site what it is, and although I hold the overall decision it’s good practice to make sure you’re not going to piss off 90% of your community.

As I suspected, most people really liked the current design but knew it had room for improvements so I decided that was the route to go down.

My initial list of improvements looked something like this:

But I knew it would probably increase

Losing the ball and chain

From looking at my logs I could tell IE6 usage had dropped from the previous 6% down to a glorious 2.5% and I was in no doubt that I wouldn’t even bother writing one hack for IE6 in the re-design. Let me say now, that having IE7 as your minimum browser is brilliant. Although it’s hardly a great browser you do find yourself writing less hacks and being able to use far more selectors which in turn reduces the amount of markup.

Wherever possible I made an effort to drop #ids and .classes on as many elements as possible and use CSS to get around the DOM. I think using this approach is the right way to write semantic HTML as you find yourself questioning every div, and ensuring they have semantic naming if they are required (#content-left, .float-right etc are some of the names that drive me mad)

So although I had shit loads to do, at least IE6 hacking wasn’t one of them.

There you have a little idea behind why I started it and in future parts I’ll cover some more specifics and drop a few hints and tips I picked up as I went.

Posted on Tuesday, June 16th 2009 and there are 4 comments

Categories: CSS, General, HTML

4 Comments

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