Comments on: New Design, New WordPress, First Ajax, First Scriptaculous

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By: brad.touesnard.com » Redesigned and refocused on usability

brad.touesnard.com » Redesigned and refocused on usability — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 08:42:54 +0000

[...] The last time I redesigned this site I had a lot of ideas that had been gathering in my head, on little notepads, and in e-mails that all went into the design with no real focus on a set of design goals. And it showed. [...]

By: BT

BT — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 06:29:24 +0000

Thanks for the encouraging words folks! Good to know people are having fun with it. I certainly had fun building it.

Scott, when mentioning AJAX I am referring to the “Live Search” implementation in the header, which does make a server-side call to a PHP page to return search results in a DHTML animated dropdown. Well, at least it is supposed to, it is very new, so there could be bugs.

Yea, I’ve taken a quick look at the documentation for the YUI libraries and the design patterns. The design patterns were not all that revolutionary, but the YUI looked pretty good. Again, not a fan of bulky libraries though. If someone would make a library that comes with a tool to compile a JS file with only the library elements used and the neccessary dependencies, now that would be cool!

Thanks for the preloader code and the inspiration!

By: Scott Schiller

Scott Schiller — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 05:42:21 +0000

Not bad!

If I may suggest a clarification, AJAX in the technical sense is when server requests are involved; all that other animation stuff and whatnot is just plain old javascript. In the words of amy hoy (http://www.slash7.com/articles/category/ajax/ – check it) – “no server requests? It ain’t AJAX.” (She’s got a great AJAX “fact sheet” which you can print and hang outside your desk/cube.)

You might be interested in Yahoo’s YUI libraries and design patterns. http://yuiblog.com/

By: Sean McGrath

Sean McGrath — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 03:03:12 +0000

looks good brad! the animation is slick and ajax rules! i have been using it at work for the last little while, and i know the next site i overhaul or create will certainly have some in it.

my only complaint is with the live search (using safari)…..but i’m not really sure how it is supoosed to work…

By: BT

BT — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 17:34:24 +0000

Thanks for the input Lukester, my design training is next to nothing so it’s good to get a professional opinion.

I was going for something very different with this one, something that clashes horribly. I think my design goals were huge menu, retro background, throw a car in the there somewhere, giant titles, and a bit of apple style. Wow, maybe I should have planned it out a little, hah!

“Throw a car in there” is my favorite though.

By: Luke

Luke — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 17:30:16 +0000

ha ha you went to town
they are cool effects but i liked your old style better
i think for a site like yours the ajax should be more subtle
not the ajax.. but the animation aspect of it
yeah, but it’s sort of there just because you put it in.. not because it adds anything
sorry i dont wanna be dissing your work, just my comments
the background is pretty distracting too
i think some of the font sizes are a bit off too
the menu is super large
and there sa bit of a mismatch between your retro-futuristic background theme and the icons you use for the categories, which are kind of like OS icons

By: BT

BT — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 17:16:48 +0000

I’ve noticed the animation is a bit sluggish rendering in Firefox too. I’m going to try a few things to optomize it, maybe decreasing the background size will help, and turning off ‘repeat-x’.

By: JeffG

JeffG — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 17:08:39 +0000

very scriptacular! My only criticism is that the page performs like a dog on my iBook, mostly because of this:

background: #cccc99 url(“images/bg.gif”) repeat-x fixed top left;

fixed bg images are non-speedy on Macs ( except maybe bunny… )