I thought this domain might bring some business but over the five years or so it’s been up, nary a thing. I would have deleted it but several sites sit under it so I renew it every year. When it went up it used several new CSS3 tricks and I was quite happy with it but now it looks like a porn site. My experience is that prospects don’t look for search optimizers. The few requests that I have had to do search optimization on existing websites have come through the warthog.co.za site. Invariably I decline the job – no-one likes messing with someone else’s code.
So, being un-busy I did what I usually do and spring cleaned the server and redesigned a website of mine – search-optimizers in this case. I also take the opportunity to try out some new code. I am a visitor to Hotscripts, PHPJabbers and CodeCanyon and it was the latter I wandered about.
Before that however, I thought I would ditch my usual site template in favour of a grid based layout and try it out. I found a very good one too – responsive and easy to use.
For the last few months, I also took the opportunity to play with some sliders. I am not a fond lover of these things. Not because of what they are but because of the way they are abused. So many designers have no design ability but feel compelled to have a slider. So, they take a bunch of happy clip art and add some banal marketing text. How boring can that be? What a waste of pixels.
I first bought WowSlider which comes with a GUI. It’s a bit limited but is a good start. Then NivoSlider simply in order to get text on the side of the slide like the BBC rather than at the bottom. I thought it was overrated and only used it once.
I then came to CodeCanyon and RevoSlider which I used on warthog.co.za/primatecare. I was impressed until I chanced upon LayerSlider. This thing can do just about everything so I stress tested it on warthog.co.za and had real fun.
So, this was the slider of choice for the new website. In contrast to the frenetic Warthog slider, I was going to make this one more refined and subdued. In addition to the new layout and slider I bought a megamenu script. Now, I used these things way back in about 2000. There was no jquery then but they worked.
Another element that’s very useful in containing a lot of content in a small space is tabs. Since CSS3, there have been quite a few. Nowadays, they are very sophisticated and versatile so I ended up with SkyTabs.
Responsive Grid System: www.grahamrobertsonmiller.co.uk
MegaMenu: pixelworkshop
LayerSlider: kreatura
SkyTabs: voky
So, the new site was going to be challenge. It was and I spent more than a week at it. It all dovetailed nicely together and the only grit in the Vaseline was the width of the tab content. I used up most of a day trying to find the suspect code and eventually it was some CSS for a
One more new thing on the site – font awesome for the icon fonts on the menu and visual light box for the screenshots.
I was used to working with a single CSS stylesheet but now I have twenty.
Incidentally, PHPJabbers have some new free scripts – single long web page with sticky header, ‘To Page Top’ script and an infinite scroll (Facebook) script.