Pretty in Pink
As you can see the colors and layout have changed for this site. My husband and I have spent two days working on the perfect design that exhibits my true personality. I came up with the design and he did all of the CSS styling and other coding that needed to be done. I mostly sat by and pointed out where he was missing tags or made creative decisions.
If you're interested in what the banner above is, the photo was taken in the front yard of my childhood home in Severn, MD. It was taken during a big snow storm we had in 1997 (For Maryland it was a big snow storm). I have a lot of stories to tell about that house and my childhood, so I thought that it would make a good banner photo for this site.
Comments
I thought I would also point out that this site is best veiwed in FireFox : http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
Posted by: Caffeine | February 18, 2004 10:38 AM
I like the pink. I'm viewing the site in Firefox but my poor tired eyes can barely read the text. The contrast isn't great enough for me. I have been having problems with my eyes for the past couple of years (deterioration of the optic nerve and the retina) and my problem may not be shared with anyone else that comes to your very beautifully designed site.
Posted by: skank | February 18, 2004 08:13 PM
Sorry about that, I tend to think of the pretty when I want to design a new website and not so much the usefulness. What are the biggest problems you have with trying to read my site? Maybe I can fix them without changiing the overall theme of the page.
Posted by: Caffeine | February 19, 2004 11:48 AM
I wouldn't want to even begin to suggest that you change your site because of my poor vision . . . but since you ask . . . making the text bold or a darker color (black) or larger or all of the above would probably do it.
Posted by: skank | February 19, 2004 04:35 PM
Hmm - I'm sure that FreshCaf and I will try several of those things to fix it. We talked about the contrast, but our young eyes made us think that it was adequate.
I should mention several thing. In Firefox, if text isn't the right size, you can hit Ctrl-Plus or Ctrl-Minus to increase or decrease it. Or, if you surf like me with one hand on the mouse and the other hand hovering over the left side of the keyboard, you can hold Ctrl and move the scroll wheel up and down to change font sizes.
There's also the "Fonts and Colors" preferences section, but that's not terribly helpful because you generally want to make changes on a case by case basis - and when it's this easy, why wouldn't you? I also use Simon's Readability Bookmarklets on a regular basis to make text flows narrower and to change to a more readable font.
http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/08/02/readabilityBookmarklets
And if you ever want to just change your colors to black on white with blue and purple links, check Zap Colors and the other bookmarklets on that site.
http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html#zap_colors
Interesting side note: By the age of 50, the average person has lost 20% of their optic function. That's a HUGE difference, without even thinking about what those with worse than average vision are going through.
Posted by: Jemal | February 19, 2004 05:51 PM
I remember 50. Thanks for the encouraging words...
I took a look at the bookmarklet page. How do you use those on pages you run across while browsing? I clicked on the two that he had on the page and saw that they work as advertised but I don't have a clue how i can use them to help me. My eye was drawn to the comment by francois:
"That's useful, thanks. Wonder what it'll mean in the longer term for web designers, though, since this is hardly a solution for the layman."
Posted by: skank | February 20, 2004 12:08 AM
Strangely, they're intended for we designers. =-)
The thing is that if they came in the default installation, or in a custom install for a specific group, they'd seem just like a normal part of the application.
Either right-click on them and select Add Bookmark and place them in your Bookmarks Toolbar Folder or drag them to the toolbar.
Posted by: Jemal | February 20, 2004 04:24 AM