tjameswhite.com

After a long week of 10+ hour day, the new company web site is up. It’s not perfect and it’s not error free, but it’s done. Hopefully I can now get some rest, finish my usual work at work, and maybe finish off some projects around the house.

As for the site, everything actually went rather smoothly. Since the last time we redesign we took the time to standardize as much as possible, porting the content from the old table-based layout to a semantic, css-driven layout was pretty straight forward. Now all of the content resides in meaningful blocks that we can move and style to our whims.

For the user, one of the biggest goals I wanted to accomplish was flattening the site out as much as possible. The main navigation is virtually static now throughout the entire site. Tony also created a pseudo-site search function that indexes the site and allows at least rudimentary searching of all of the contents. Finally, the use of standardized HTML should result in better search engine indexing.

For me, the biggest personal wins are my lighter-weight code, css experimentation and the programming I learned.

I created one HTML template that is flexible enough for every page that we needed to create. Additionally, because it is css based, it is about 1/4 the size of a more traditional table-and-image layout. Our parent company was so impressed with what I created that they have used it for the base of the official template that all of the sister companies are suppose to use.

For styling, I broke the style sheet into four for ease of maintenance. I don’t think that worked as well as I wanted, but it does separate generic base styles from content specific. Not to mention that is makes each file shorter and therefore easy to navigate when updating. I also created a print style sheet, which on Friday had already received positive reviews from users. Welcome to the benefits of standards and styles.

Finally, out of sheer necessity, I learned a little bit of perl and increased my PHP knowledge. While I didn’t fully hack the two WordPress installations, I did a fair bit of tweaking to both. The new press room is a pretty standard installation. I did more tweaking with the Reference Reviews. Because there are three reviewers, I essentially wanted three columns rolled into one. Tweaking the permalink structure allowed me to link to each authors column, and still provide an all-in-one archive. The nice thing about using a true dynamic tool is that I no longer have to build each month’s column by hand and manual archive them.

Outside of standard WordPress tweaking, I created a couple of bits of PHP code from scratch. To keep the reviews up-to-date dynamically, I set up a variable to grab the date which is then passed to the navigation links so they automatically point to the current month’s reviews. That was fairly easy. I also created a script that looks at the page you are viewing, updates the <title> element and creates the breadcrumb trail. That stretched my limited programming abilities, but I’m proud to say I got it working.

And that’s pretty much it. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to more semi-regular posting. Of course, all that work also gave me ideas for modifying this site.