Weirdthings.com totally renovated
I spent the past week totally renovating Weirdthings.com. What started as a simple project to adjust some layout issues ended up being a massive re-haul from the ground up. Good thing I had the flu or the Ebola virus or whatever it is I’ve got and the time (Jeff Rutenberg assured me that I didn’t get the Bird Flu from watching the Discovery Channel). It’s not unlike cleaning up your place (I would imagine). In the online web directory I found all sorts of junk I forgot was even there. Some of it was some cool freebie tricks in PDF form. I’ll be reposting those in a more visible way soon.
The first thing you’ll notice is that I’ve gone with a new theme. It’s a mixture of metal, industrial and black and grey. I call Industrial-Deco (hey, it’s my website, I’ll call it what I want).
The other big change is the way everything is laid out. I’ve tried to make it much easier to navigate and get information. I have a personal hate on for Flash sites that have loud music, blinding animations and content that’s hard as hell to find. I also hate the fact that most of them are squeezed into a tiny box no matter the size of your monitor. I played around with Flash years ago and realized it was very cool, but not the best solution for what’s essentially an online catalog. That said, I have used Flash video provided by YouTube extensively throughout for product previews.
The menu bar on the side of the page is intended to make it easier to find things. We’ll see how well that works out. At the top of the bar I’ve created a section called Gallery. This was intended as a view of everything I’ve published. I painstakingly placed almost 30 images into it and created hyperlinks for all of them. It looked cool. Then I realized I forgot a couple things. It turns out I have about 32 products. Who knew? I’ll send a signed copy of one of the missing items to the first person who emails me the answer. I won’t hold my breath.
Another new feature is the Preview Theater. This is a section where you can access all of my video clips (thank you again to YouTube). I had a little fun, maybe too much fun designing the Mad Max look of the theater section. I decided to tone it down when I was trying to figure out where to place the speakers I’d made in Photoshop at 4 AM.
The most important new edition is probably the FAQ section. I’ve consolidated all of the various product FAQ’s I’ve written over the years into one place. You’ll notice that there aren’t that many. I’m a slacker. If you have any questions about anything, send them to me and I’ll see if I have answers. If you get them to me while I’m still stricken by what must be the West Nile Virus, you’ll probably have a chance of getting them answered with 50% less sarcasm. It’s so bad I couldn’t even think of a comment when the people at the Wendy’s drive-thru screwed up my order three times.
I tested the site on Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer. It’s a proven fact that once you become a Mac person Microsoft stuff works even worse. I had the most problems trying to get everything to work right on IE. However that has more to do with me being an idiot than the coding skills of the fine people in Redmond and Bangalore. I ran it through an HTML validator at the W3 site and it melted their server. Despite those setbacks and my battling the Marburg virus, I got the site up and running on all three browsers - at least the versions I had. We’ll see.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
