November 162008
DesertWeather.com Gets a New Look!
After 6 weeks of development the new design is finally finished! The new cleaner design is a huge improvement over the old aging one. It almost has a “web 2.0″ look if you want to call it that. Also more of a “desert feel” as “Old Jim” put it. I have to agree with him.
I went back and forth over the decision to design the site for monitors that display 800 in width. The stats keep decreasing on visitors that use that resolution and are in the single digits now so the decision was finalized to tailor it to 1024 and up. The old design certainly wasn’t for 800 either so I didn’t want to go backwards in the evolution of web design. Visitors that use smaller monitors might have to scroll horizontally to see the whole page.
As you can see, I used the same design for this blog. It still needs a little fine tuning but its 99% done. The menu on both the main site and this blog is now horizontal up on the header. It looks great but does not allow for too many top level links without getting in the way of the header. In the menu you will find a “Other” tab. This is to accommodate all the content that I couldn’t fit elsewhere. I will be fine tuning the menu to try to make everything as easy to find as it was before. (keep an eye on the header through out the day on the main page, particularly at sunrise and sunset, I’ve added a little trick to it to keep it interesting)
I want to send a special thanks to freecsstemplates.org for the base template. I certainly didn’t have the time to do all this by scratch!
Please feel free to give me your opinions and/or suggestions in the comment below.
Thank you,
John Slama
This was a fantastic surprise when I logged on to DesertWeather for the first time today. What a great looking page. Easier on the eyes and easier to navigate in my opinion. I cannot wait to see the surprise with the header throughout the day. Great work John!!
I think I over hyped the header change. Around sunrise and again at sunset it changes from sun logo to moon. I’m working on some code that will display the moon’s current phase instead of full moon all the time. I’m glad you like the change Jim.