Redesigning, Yet Again
As you have probably noticed, I am slowly reworking the page. I am trying to make it more up to web standards and make it more attractive. I am also going to be putting up my old web comics. This is a chore in and of itself since I am attempting to use a system that really wasn’t intended for comic publishing.
As far as web standards go, it is coming along nicely. If you remove all styling, the page is still very readable and easy to navigate. It isn’t nearly as pretty, but it should be really nice for those text-based browser people. I personally don’t know why anyone with a text-based browser would look at this site, but it is good practice for me.
The page is also becoming more search engine friendly. Code wise, the pertinent information is closer to the top of the page thus making it easier for search engines to spider. One bit of SEO I stumbled across while setting up the comics was that I could make the text of the comics searchable. It is a bit more work putting up a comic because of it, but via Textpattern I can put a transcript of the comic in the page that is hidden. That way the text can be spidered and queried.
Another thing I have done so that I can handle all the extra content I plan to add is make a dropdown menu. Thanks to a tutorial on A List Apart, I was able to make a nice, degradable menu system. It only uses a little Javascript and that is because of IE(Internet Explorer) shortfalls in CSS.
Attractiveness is coming along too. So far I really only have colors picked out, but the actual graphics should be coming along soon. The plan is not to use too many images, but just enough to give it a little pizazz. I really only want to use them to ad some curves, highlights and shadows to give the page more depth. It would be really nice if I could use SVG, but that will have to wait until IE gets proper support. For now I will stick with PNG.
Now the comic publishing is going to take a bit more work. TXP is a great CMS, but I like to handle my comic images a bit differently than how it handles image files. Namely maintaining the file name. For comics, I use the naming convention of YYYYMMDD.png. This shortfall aside, it seems to handle basic navigation pretty well. Chapters and beginning comic navigation seem to be a bit of trouble. Hopefully I will be able to find a solution to that. If all fails, I am sure the Textpattern Community will be able to help out. So far I have found a nice and dynamic way of posting the comic files using vanilla TXP functionality.
Right now I am going to focus on the text content and design, then I will get the comics fully operational. When that happens I will put up my findings so that someone else may be helped by them.
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