This page was last updated pre-IE7.
About the Design
This site is designed using the latest in web standards1. Effectively what this means is that the design of this site makes use of the most up-to-date Web technology available for writing webpages but without compromising accessibilty. It's hard to say in a short sentence. Basically, this website is designed as well as I know. It makes use of XHTML 1.0 Strict (the language used to define what text on a page is headers, what text on a page is a menu, things like that), CSS 1, 2 + 3 (to define what the different parts of the page look like), PHP (to decide what text to output at what time) and Javascript (to do some snazzy things with the menu).
Now, there is but one problem with designing using the most up-to-date technology. It's similar to trying to run a really expensive new program on a really old computer. It is this: only the most up-to-date web browsers like up-to-date code.
So, if you are running the latest version of Opera, Mozilla (and other Gecko programs such as Firefox) or Safari then you should be fine.
There's a problem though: statistics show that the majority of people don't use any of the above browsers and use Internet Explorer. Now, Internet Explorer is literally the bane of my life. In each day I live as a web designer it makes my life a misery.
You see, Internet Explorer is not an up-to-date web browser. In fact, the rendering engine2 hasn't been upgraded since 2001. This leaves it streets behind all the other browsers around. Even at the time it was released it was poor in comparison. Microsoft's dominance of the computer market meant that everyone designed around its flaws though, so no-one noticed.
The fact is, to do almost any designs in Internet Explorer which are reasonably complex (such as this site) and use web standards you have to design around its flaws. It's not nice. You can make something look beautiful in every single other web browser and find that Internet Explorer mangles it completely. Then, once you make it look pretty but not stunning in Internet Explorer, it looks rubbish in other browsers. Basically, good web design and Internet Explorer don't mix.
I'm getting off-topic here but I have to continue, because a lot of you will be saying well, how come all the sites I visit look fine?
I'd ask you to remember what I've said about web standards. Such websites, on the whole, ignore the most up-to-date web standards. This is a Bad Thing. If you want a better explanation than I could manage on why, check out this page at the Web Standards Project.
Yes, there are websites that look fine on Internet Explorer and still conform to web standards. My previous website was an example. The thing is, such sites often require hacks to get around mistakes in Internet Explorer's rendering engine. On a site as complicated as this one, even with hacks it's not possible to get Internet Explorer to display it properly without wrecking it for the good browsers.
So here's this site, written using the latest web standards. If you're using Internet Explorer, I've deliberately given you a different page that IE 6 can cope with. It doesn't have a nice collapsable menu, and much of the design isn't quite perfect. If you use an earlier version such as IE 5 it'll appear even worse. If you want to see this site in its full glory3, do yourselves and web designers everywhere a favour and download one of the browsers mentioned above.
- Technologies set by an international body to make the internet as useful and easy to use to as large a number of people as possible, while at the same time making things easier for web designers.
- The part of a web browser that takes the code of a web page and decides how to display it on the screen.
- Yes, glory is a relative term. Glory in relation to my previous sites and many other, non-standards-compliant sites.
