Design and usability updates
Written at 17:19, on Wednesday 2 November 2005. Tags: personal usability webdesign .
Just wanted to say all those all two of you feedreaders that I’ve restyled my site a bit. I created it with Halloween in mind, but of course I managed to be a day late with this launch. I’ve achieved the worn look thanks to a set of brushes (via).
Also check out my new contact form, which is now more or less unobtrusively enhanced with asynchronous javascript (aka AJAX). Thanks go to Dustin Diaz for sharing his ajax contact form after much begging and threatening. There are some improvements to be made to make it fully accessible and unobtrusive, for example, it doesn’t handle errors with PHP now, and there’s some hidden text in the contact form which is read by screen readers. But still great work for a 0.9 version!
Another usability improvement is the live previews for comments. I also ditched the obligatory preview button which forced you through a reload of the page. Now you can see exactly how your comment will look like at the bottom of the textarea. It even works with (simple) Textile markup; try adding a link or make something bold. Of course, it sucks that there’s so little space below the comment are for the live preview, but I’ll be tackling that in a next redesign. (Although I agree with Furak and Hayo that realign is a buzzword .)
Finally, I’ve taken lesson from Jonathan Boutelle and made my journal more useful (hopefully) thanks to his concept of a Mullet-style blog layout According to my referrals, there are plenty of you entering here via Google, so this should help those visitors to more easily find their way through this site.
Assuming that you’re not one of my two regular readers (one is myself), what do you think of these changes?
(And yes, more useful posts, including a book review and some info on our accessibility research, are upcoming. Stay tuned!)
Update – if not for Halloween, then surely I could have put my restyle forth as part of the CSS Reboot Fall 2005. Oh well….
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