Not since discovering the CSS clear command has so much about creating well designed websites that are completely accessible been made clear to me.

Today I discovered sIFR, a way to use flash to display all of the pretty fonts that you want to use without having to resort to using images and destroying your mark-up.

For a while I have come across websites that have these cool fonts without them being on my machine or specified anywhere in the CSS. I always wondered how they did it, but couldn’t find anything too useful in the code. Today I hit the jackpot, someone actually implemented it with all the nicely commented CSS and Javascript. I think I was always looking at a site that had the older version, so it wasn’t so obvious what was going on.

Anyway, these headings are typified by being able to select the text but not view the selection, being able to select both the heading text and the body text at the same time or just looking plain cool.

I’ve passed this little tidbit on to our designers and I think imagin8 will be using this technique in a lot of its future designs.

Viva la Accessibility!!

I decided the time had come to change the design of my site, mostly because I wanted to brush up on my design skills a little.

So, this is what I came up with. I’m moderately pleased with it; could be a little nicer, but practice makes perfect. I thought that while I was at it, I should have a go at basing the site on a blogging platform and do away with the mostly-static PHP approach that I had before.

I went with the slogan “discovering beauty in code” because I think that there really is a sort of elegance about good code that could be considered beautiful. I might change the monitor a bit, not completely happy with it atm.

I chose Wordpress as the platform and so far I have been very impressed. There have been a couple of disadvantages moving to this type of system; I can no longer boast a Strict doctype and it’s a little less portable (being database driven), but I wanted to have comments and RSS so I thought rather than build my own, I would go with something a little more established.

Themeing was a breeze. I started by cutting up my design and implementing it in straight XHTML / CSS. Then I made a copy of the default template and imported my changes. Then I went through the various pages and tweaked the CSS so that most things looked correct and voila! There are still a couple of bugs that need to be worked out, but I’m getting to them slowly.

Then I imported my old posts. The portfolio is a little out of date and I’ll try to get that fixed up soon. I’ll also have to import all the images that I used to have associated with the various posts but that will require a little more CSS and I feel I have done enough for 1 weekend. The administration section of Wordpress is very good; quite usable and very attractive. Little bits of DHTML and AJAX are implemented in a way that complements the user experience rather than claiming it.

I recommend everyone give Wordpress a bit of a go, it really is quite easy to install, theme and get up and running!