Blog Redesign

Mark off another goal accomplished - While waiting for some custom pulleys to be made to get our lathes going, I'm spending the next several days working full-time on revamping our blog and website.  This blog is the first example.  It has been woefully amateurish looking for some time now, because I created the layout a couple of years ago on an old square-aspect monitor, which didn't show the background very much.  On modern widescreens, the repeating pipe motif was incredibly annoying, but for the past year I simply haven't had the time to do anything about it.  Now it is finally an all-new look!  Once again, I did all the coding and graphics myself, with lots of consultation and advice from Emily.

My main goal was to be simple, without fancy special effects or anything, but to convey a more polished and professional look.  I would like to have simple animated buttons up top, but I don't know how to do that sort of coding in javascript so that's out for the moment.

One new feature is the pipe sketch at the top of the sidebar, left.  That's an actual design sketch I did while tending our table at the Richmond pipe show, and it's going to become a pipe one of these days.  I set up that little drawing area to be easily modified, and periodically I intend to change the pipe sketches out, for a varying peek at some of the ideas I have.

The only current problem I know of with the new layout is that older versions of Internet Explorer (6 and earlier) do not properly display transparent graphics, so the sidebar top will look bizarre.  I've researched for a solution to this problem only to find that there isn't one, or at least not one that's within my technical capabilities with CSS code (The prime solution seems to be to write an exclusion designed to recognize one's browser and swap out a flat JPG for the transparent PNG, but this is more complex than I know how to do, alas...).  Thankfully, users of older IE versions are a pretty small slice of the net these days, so hopefully it won't be a major problem.  Please leave a comment if you have any other problems viewing the site, and be sure to include your browser version and OS, thanks!

Next up, the main website....