My homepage has received a large update, providing a fresh, clean style to all the pages under the mjac.co.uk domain. The styling also applies to this blog and, excluding a few typography questions that require pondering, I am very happy with the result. Google and other search engines have been taken into consideration but the major improvement in my opinion is the human accessibility and functionality. I use design techniques to draw the user to sections of the page and assist navigation.
When my skills increase I often revisit older projects and, if necessary, update them using my improved techniques. This presents an accurate portrayal of my current abilities as most of my work then lies around a similar level of skill. This redesign signifies another skill increase.
Considerations when designing my latest homepage include:
- Standards compliant CSS and XHTML that renders correctly in at least 95% of users browsers (Mozilla Firefox, IE6, IE7, Safari)
- Attractive design using more images that are relevant to that specific page
- Increased placement of search engine keywords such as ‘Michael Clark’, ‘Mjac’ and ‘Programming’
- Decays transparently when JavaScript, images or both are disabled
- Use of freeware (mostly open source) software throughout to design, implement and test the website
- Usable monotone print stylesheet to save coloured ink and paper
- HTTP header detection to send the correct mime type (application/xhtml+xml) and XML declaration to browsers that support it while using the XHTML doctype with HTML mimetype (text/html) as default for other browsers
These are all precursors to larger projects. For instance I would like to add articles on a variety of topics to the homepage without having to use external software like Serendipity to edit content. DocBook support would be excellent. I could just upload a DocBook article to the website and new software would be able to categorise, process and cache it before rendering the document in the new design. Hopefully these thoughts will become reality in the not-so-distant future.
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