Lisa Goodlin Design

I’ve started the redesign of the CNY Skeptics website. The current version is the second incarnation of the site and was made at a time when all I knew how to do was make a tables-based layout. Don’t even ask about the first version.

Several years and a whole education in CSS later, I’m going to do it up properly. I’m going to keep the blue and white color scheme and add some rust and dark brown. The background will be white, and it will be a stunning example of clean and simple. I hope.

Today it took me twenty minutes to do a job I thought it would take two hours at least to do. The MIMMT site was displaying in all its IE Quirks Mode Glory, and I had to do something about it. What I decided to do was create a separate IE style sheet and call it with a conditional. At first it wouldn’t work. I used “at import”, and it just wouldn’t import. Then I found an article on conditionals at Elated that worked perfectly in getting “less than IE 7″ to call the CSS.

Very quickly I was able to modify the style sheet to satisfy quirky IE and was done in twenty. Glorying in my victory, I hooted and shook my fist in the air like some doofus major league sports star.

I’m a very happy web designing camper at Camp Valid Code in the Amazon Booklist camp! My booklist was making my code invalid, and even though I know it’s not really my fault, it’s demoralizing to get a gazillion errors in about ten lines of code. Now Amazon has a-stores for associates, and the code is much better, and it validates.

I like the colors. I like the double “d” to emphasize design and to balance the graphics on the left. But I need to do more with the background. Right now there is a very subtle gradient – don’t want to be too Web 2.0, you know. Maybe stripes.