Progressive Enhancement - Part One

August 19, 2003 | 0 Comments

It’s been a few days since I redesigned, rebuilt and relaunched and so far so good. As the feedback has been coming in via comments and e-mail I’ve been trying to take what I’m hearing and start making plans for some progressive enhancement to the site. Thanks to everyone for their input.

Last night I tackled a few of the more minor issues and got myself organized to tackle a few more. Here is a quick run down of what I’ve been doing.

Content inventory and audit.The first thing I did was go through all of my content and categories. I was finding that my category pages we’re that useful and that I had quite a few categories that were unused, so I grouped some together and eliminated some.

This give me much more flexibility in my archives and with new features like The Song of The Week and Quicklinks. These categories are a bit like red-headed step children (no offense) and they don’t behave like the others. That is by design, but I’ve noticed Movable Type doesn’t have a really good way to deal with this stuff yet.

I was very tempted to take my own advice and change some of the old titles, but due to the nature of this site I felt it was best to leave them alone.

Song of The Week Player. There are some bugs with this that frankly I’ve got no clue how to tackle. They seem to mostly happen with IE on a PC and only on certain ISPs or behind a firewall.

If it looks funky or doesn’t have the current song — that’s your reason. Hopefully sometime I can find a solution.

Screen resolutions There has been some feedback about how the site looks at various smaller and larger screen resolutions. While I don’t plan on doing much here, I’m going to play with some alternate style sheets that, if perfected, I’ll make available in some way so you can customize your experience.

That’s all for now. Thanks to everyone who helped out, sent e-mail or made a comment on the redesign. So far I’m very happy with it and it seems like most of you are too.

Filed under: Web Design