dummied

The Open's opening

At a glance

This entry was written on May 12, 2006.

The entry prior to this is entitled Fork in the road.

The entry following this is entitled Open-ing wider.

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This entry has been tagged as CSS, Newspapers, Recommended, Sports, TheOpen, Work, XHTML.

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I've been at the new job for nearly a month now and it's been pretty much everything I expected it to be: outrageously busy, occasionally frustrating, increasingly productive and ultimately rewarding.

A lot of those three weeks were spent cleaning things up and maintenance work — updating the contact info, changing the home section around, updating the Celebrations section, designing contest pages and sending out the weekly entertainment newsletter.

My one big project, though, is off the ground starting today. The LoHud.com U.S. Open preview site is more-or-less my baby ... though it is nowhere near as beautiful as I had envisioned back when I had originally mocked the site up.

There were a lot of cooks in the kitchen — from corporate (very helpful) to our own sports and graphics departments. The design is kind of mish-mash of different hands and different ideas, but the underlying code is all me and the underlying functionality is largely created and thought up by me (with a pretty healthy dollop of CMS-specific help from the guys at corporate).

The site is the most-sprawling thing I have yet to construct, and you can tell just by the size of the CSS file (25KB last I checked ... I would have liked to have split it up into multiple files, but just didn't have the time).

And, after wondering for a while now about how productive I could be if I did web-design full-time, the whole thing went from zero to launch in less than three weeks.

There are issues I still would like to fix (like the appearance of the Podcasts list in WinIE6) and there's tons (and I mean tons) more functionality that I am still going to be adding as we get closer to Open week (dynamic photo galleries, the leaderboard, etc.). The CSS is certainly bulkier than it probably needs to be, but that's a function of having to work quickly. The same thing goes for the few breakdowns in semantic HTML (I have a few things that should be unordered lists that, in my haste, are instead marked up with br's).

There are no tables on the Open site (until we start getting results from the course, then that information will be rightly displayed in tables) and I relied a lot of Dan Cederholm's favorite mark-up technique, definition lists, because a lot of the content on the site exists in a Label->Content->Label->Content sort of structure naturally and seemed to fit definition lists to a tee (no pun intended).

It was also nice to be told not to worry about IE5 or 5.5, or MacIE for that matter. I honestly don't know if I could have gotten this site finished if support for those browsers had been a major issue.

I really flexed my still-growing CSS muscles on some parts of this site and I'll talk more about some of the nerdy-fun things I discovered/used over the next week or so.

Right now, though, I could use a day away from the computer screen (which is why it's a shame I have to go to work today).