FanCruft, my anime website, has just gotten a much-needed facelift. Here are before and after pictures:
When I first made Fancruft, I wanted to make it look good even in Internet Explorer 5 running on a fairly low-resolution screen (640×480). Many “Web 2.0″ concepts were new; RFC4627 was published just earlier that year. People were still advocating Smarty for PHP templating. I had been a Wikipedia administrator for maybe around a year and a half, and had not yet read The Wisdom of Crowds.
A lot of works still needs to go into FanCruft, but it now has a fairly modern face. IE 5 is no longer a concern, and the site now renders much more consistently across IE 7, Firefox 2 and 3, Opera, and Safari. IE 6 doesn’t seem to understand fixed positioning and misinterprets it as absolute positioning, but this is still acceptable. The site is now designed for a screen of 800×600, but linearizes fairly well and should still be acceptable on smaller screens.
The independent “scattered” buttons have been replaced by a bar with a uniform height and no margin. Min-width is now supported well enough that I don’t mind just setting it and forgetting it, instead of using the IE5/6 hacks of yesteryear. Also, the buttons now glow gold on hover; yay!
The fine print at the bottom of the page has been cut down to a minimum, and the RSS icon now hovers on screen, just in case it isn’t noticed in the browser’s address bar. Overall, FanCruft is sleek and good looking.
Ah, so you went with the template? Pity you didn’t include the random slashdottery.
It’s a template, but it’s a template that I made.
As for the random slashdottery that I used instead of Lorem Ipsem, you can get as much as you want at http://www.bbspot.com/toys/slashtitle/.