A New, New Look

So TheStable has been given (another) facelift.  Hopefully this one will last more than a few weeks.  Let me explain.

Wordpress 2.7 was due out soon and I thought to myself (about a month ago) wouldn’t it be nice to have a spiffy new theme to coincide with the next version of Wordpress which also received a significant reworking in the theme department.  So I began planning and desigining and theming and coding and produced a cool theme.  In my travels I discovered WooThemes who provided the base for the previous theme (although in the end it was only really a skeleton) and stupidly checked their site recently and discovered a new theme which appealed to me greatly.  The clean lines, simple colours and simple structure meant it was easy to build on whilst still containing features that I liked.

So the old theme has been replaced after only a very short time.  The new theme is a customised version of the typebased WooTheme.  The sidebar on the right is smaller, meaning more room for content (thanks Mel for the suggestion), post author’s gravatar now appear with their name in the left column, popular posts (at the bottom) have been replaced with recent Nici art and the ‘featured posts’ section from the previous theme is now included.  There was something missing without it.

I feel sad that the old theme was so short lived but I do feel that the new theme is better in many ways.  Hopefully you like it too.  As usual, this theme is developed to be completely standards compliant and as such is likely to break in Internet Explorer.  If you are using IE, please upgrade your browser to Firefox, Opera, Chrome or Safari or, if you must, IE8.  The site will work in IE7 but won’t look as nice.  There are more than enough rants about that one around, suffice to say that IE is a waste of space.  If the code is standards compliant and it doesn’t render properly it is the fault of the rendering engine, NOT the developer.  Furthermore, web designers/developers should not have to go out of their way to include browser specific ‘hacks’ to make things work on browsers which refuse to comply with the accepted standards.

Web Standards

I’m a big believer in standards based web sites and standards based design and as such have tweaked this website to be completely standards compliant. “But wait!” I hear you say, “hasn’t it always been that way?” Well it was up until the creation of the photo gallery. The photo gallery uses a script called thickbox which allows the pictures, when clicked, to display on a css layer ontop of the page. Normally the page fades out a little to draw focus to the new layer however this uses transparency effects which at this time aren’t standards compliant.

The script also contained hacks and what not to make it operate better visually with IE6. Since IE6 doesn’t like to follow standards they, in my opinion, can miss out on the desired visual effects. As a web designer, catering to the needs of users who insist on using a browser which doesn’t make any attempt to integrate W3C standards just perpetuates the problems. If IE users discover that web pages 1) don’t work and 2) look bad then there is greater motivation to switch to a better featured and standards compliant browser.

If you would like the thickbox css file which is standards compliant, you can get it here. Please note that this will make it look less ‘pretty’.