dummied

Something for the portfolio

At a glance

This entry was written on February 10, 2006.

The entry prior to this is entitled Newspapers and the search game.

The entry following this is entitled Simplifying print URLs.

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This entry has been tagged as CSS, MovableType, Work, XHTML.

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After several months of Photoshopping, coding, copy editing and prodding, the website for my sister's upcoming wedding is now live.

As I mentioned a few entries back, not all the functionality is live yet, and we're still missing a mug shot for one of the groomsmen, but for all intents and purposes, it's live and ready for viewing.

To the best of my testing, the design works in IE 5.0 and 6.0 in Windows, IE 5.2 in Mac, Safari and Firefox. The design breaks into an unholy mess in IE 5.5 and the navbar breaks in Opera 8.02 (though I'm not sure why in either case and am banking on the intended audience ... apart from you folks ... to be close to 100-percent IE 6 users). I'd like to get the site working properly in Opera at least, and might start working on that in the coming weeks. As for 5.5, I get the feeling fixing that would take me longer than it's worth it to me, so I'm inclined to leave it alone.

The design includes not a single table and is, in my opinion, a pretty good mix of clean, semantic XHTML and CSS. Thanks to a few of those tips I stumbled across earlier, the design also lacks a separate IE hacks file ... though there are a hack or two (four, actually) buried in the main CSS file itself, mainly to deal with float clearing and/or IE Mac.

It makes pretty extensive use of Sliding Doors, CSS Sprites and a host of other CSS tricks that are escaping me at the moment. The actual designing of it didn't take me very long at all (it was more or less right on the first take in Photoshop), and the CSS coding took a lot less time than I had expected. The longest portion of the work was waiting on content, which I didn't have a problem with (after all, it's not my wedding).

The site's functionality/features include a page for short biographies and photos of the wedding party (above left), directions to the church and the reception, a guestbook (above right), a photo gallery (which isn't operational yet ... but is ready to roll at a moment's notice) and a regular, boring RSS feed.

The site is built on a Movable Type backend with custom templates, custom graphics (except the decorative flourishes, which are available from Briar Press, along with a lot of others), custom CSS, a cup of copy editing, a dash of copy writing and a dollop of lightweight programming.

My sister's fairly internet-savvy, so I just changed the copy on a few entry screens in Movable Type and I'm leaving that interface for her to update from. For future clients of the company Pam and I are starting (which has a name now ... kinprint), that situation's probably not going to be good enough, so I'm going to be delving back into the murky world of XML-RPC and Atom in the next couple of weeks to try and cobble together a better solution (I'm trying to get something along the lines of a web-based MarsEdit or Ecto that has a dead-simple interface but can be made backend agnostic).

I'll officially add this to the portfolio in the next week, but feel free to head over, kick the tires and let me know what you think in the meantime.