ch..ch..changes / journal / hicksdesign

20/11/03

ch..ch..changes

After what seems like far too long a process, my personal and portfolio sites have merged as one, and the design has evolved a wee bit. From now on everything is accessed via www.hicksdesign.co.uk, although I have spent a long time setting up redirects in a .htaccess file. Hopefully, the transition will be easy – if you’re reading this, then it has. The new location for the RSS feed is now http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/feeds/rss/index.rdf

The personal site was a public learning space. The design of it evolved as my knowledge of XHTML/CSS methodologies improved, which meant that the CSS contained redundant styles and was larger than it needed to be. This time, I started completely from scratch.

The portfolio section has been rebuilt using Movable Type, and whenever I get a chance, I’ll write up the templates so that others can use the code. Updating it should now be easier than the old flash site.

This is sort of a ‘phase 1’, which means I’m too busy with paid work to do everything I was wanting to. There are still some rough edges, and there will be more slow evolution of the design to come. My plan is to add another style option that works better under 800×600, but not as plain as the ‘diet’ style. One thing I have been able to improve on, is the look of the search results page. Under MovableType, this is a .cgi page, and can’t contain any of my php includes that make the site easy to maintain. A few days ago, I finally found a fix on a site called MT-Stuff, and all is well.

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Comments | RSS

Comments are now closed, but you can still have a jolly time reading what others have left:

Joshua said 1786 days ago:

Hey Jon, I really like the new site! Looks great!

ste said 1786 days ago:

The portfolio looks amazing; you've got some really great work! Reminds me that I really need to redo mine pretty badly.

Tim said 1786 days ago:

Looks great, Jon!

One con: on higher (1280x1024+) resolutions there's a lot of grey space to the right while all the 'weight' is on the left. Perhaps you could play around with horizontally centering the actual 'box'.

But then again, you just moved away from that.

Too early to think, more soon.

Jon Hicks said 1786 days ago:

Tim,

One of the things I'm currently working on is a slightly more fluid layout that will reduce that grey area at larger screen resolutions.

mearso said 1786 days ago:

Really like the site. I think your portfolio section has helped me nmake up my mind about mine (currently absent) I couldn't decide whether to use flash or a blog.

Cheers

Jeff Croft said 1786 days ago:

Great work, Jon! It really does all work wonderfully well!

And by all means, do post those MT templates if you get the chance. :)

Jeff

David said 1786 days ago:

Although it looks much the same, it's better organised, and still looks very cool indeed. Just when are we going to see that mouse-wheel fix implemented?