New website design is launching! Behold the pretty!: seanan

New website design is launching! Behold the pretty!

So after months of hard work, discussion, and objections to my questionable belief that orange and green are always automatically complementary colors, my new website has launched! All credit to

taraoshea for gorgeous graphic design, and to

porpentine for skillful implementation. Take a look:

http://seananmcguire.com/index.php

You will note that most of the links don't work, and that the text in the 'Appearances' box is still completely out of date. We're working on that, and I'll be posting here as things go live. (We should get the disclaimer and appearances updates done today, and then Chris is going to work on swapping over the Songbook and setting up the first of the FAQ pages.) All shame for missing text should be directed towards me, as I've been terribly lax in actually turning it in before the site was ready to go live. I need to actually be able to see how it's going to look on the page. This is the danger of having a visual mind.

But isn't it pretty? I'm just as pleased as punch, and I'm only going to get happier as more sections of the site go live. Chris is even fixing it so I can update more parts of it myself, which means it'll get fussed with daily, just like everything else I can put on a to-do list.

Squee.

Life is good.

jimhines

December 2 2008, 16:02:33 UTC 8 years ago

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Very pretty! I like the design and the layout a lot.

If I had to nitpick, there's a lot of text there, and it's a little overwhelming to my poor little brain. Overall though, it's a beautiful web site.

seanan_mcguire

December 2 2008, 16:06:02 UTC 8 years ago

Yeah, it is pretty text-heavy. But I don't have book covers or anything to hit people with as yet, and things are (going to be) pretty linear in terms of cruising to where you want to be, assuming you can work drop-down menus.

I figure the text levels will rise and fall according to what's going on.

Also, glee. Tara does wonderful work.

djonn

December 2 2008, 17:18:32 UTC 8 years ago

About those drop-down menus...

At least in my browser (IE7), once you have moused over something that has a drop-down menu, the drop-down menu will not go away again unless/until one forces a page refresh. And there are now enough drop-downs on that page that they tend to get in each other's way if one mouses over more than one of them.

Otherwise, it is indeed nifty and well-designed, and I look forward to more parts of it going live. (Forums?? Oooh....)

December 2 2008, 17:24:22 UTC 8 years ago

I'm not sure there's a way to make any page that isn't blank text or supported by an army of quality-control folks perfectly functional with every browser. It's been checked against IE 8.0 and Firefox (which is my preference anyway, it's such a nice system).

We'll definitely tinker with it, but you're the only person who's reported this issue. :(

December 2 2008, 17:39:24 UTC 8 years ago

Fascinating (he said, channeling early Spock).

Also, checked vs. IE 8? I'm not sure whether to be impressed or puzzled, given that IE 8 is still in beta.

December 2 2008, 17:46:56 UTC 8 years ago

S'what Chris said, and my job around here involves smiling and/or nodding whenever things get technical.

porpentine

December 2 2008, 20:54:51 UTC 8 years ago

1) I've actually got the current beta of IE8 set up at work for testing against, just in case.

but 2) I'm not having any problems with the page on IE 7, either at work or at home. Which unfortunately makes it tough to diagnose the problem. Two questsions, if you don't mind: what system are you running on (Mac, XP, Vista, something else?) and what are your security settings at for IE? Do you have scripting turned off, maybe?

December 2 2008, 21:14:58 UTC 8 years ago

Good questions (and I really ought to have mentioned the OS w/o prompting -- bad techie, no biscuit). I'm on Vista (Home Premium), with security set to "medium-high (default)" -- which is to say, I haven't tinkered with the customization options for that setting. If I read the screens right, that allows some flavors of scripting but limits a lot of the ActiveX options (though as I recall, I get prompted if an ActiveX issue comes up, and as that's not happened on the site, I'm assuming that's a red herring).

FWIW, I'd been having this issue with the previous iteration of the site, too, but given that there were fewer dropdowns in that schema it was easier to maneuver around and past them.

Clearly I am an anomaly.... :-)

December 2 2008, 21:35:22 UTC 8 years ago

Further experimenting: okay, this is interesting and somewhat encouraging.

Just mousing over a menu or dropdown (books, music, etc.) works properly; the dropdown disappears again when I move the mouse away. If, however, I click on a non-implemented dropdown item (ex: "The Toby Daye Series"), the dropdown does not go away when I move the mouse clear. And once I've got one of the dropdown menus perma-visible, every subsequent dropdown I open stays open, whether I click on anything or not. This tends to suggest that once all the linkage is fully enabled, the problem may go away. It is, however, distinctly odd....

catnip13

December 2 2008, 22:50:23 UTC 8 years ago

Yes. That is exactly what it is doing on mine. And our security settings are the same.

December 3 2008, 11:32:54 UTC 8 years ago

Eureka! That is definitely odd, and definitely replicable on my end. It also looks to be an IE 7-specific bug with their rendering implementation. Thankfully, it's also got a work-around that's pretty simple. I've updated the style sheet, and things should hopefully be working properly for you at this point. If not, let me know and I'll take a second look!

December 3 2008, 16:44:13 UTC 8 years ago

Fixed!

December 2 2008, 19:28:35 UTC 8 years ago

FYI, it is happening to me too. I have IE 7.0.5730.11.

December 2 2008, 20:57:02 UTC 8 years ago

If you don't mind my asking, two questions:

1) What sort of OS are you running?
2) what do you have the security settings tuned to? do you have scripting turned off?

I'd love to fix this, but since it's working without a problem for me under IE7, I need to figure out how to make it 'break' for me before I can make it better :)

December 2 2008, 22:48:38 UTC 8 years ago

XP Home 2002.

Security Setting is at "medium high," and if I'm reading it right that does turn off scripting.

FWIW, in the Safari browser on my iPhone, it freezes on the first drop down menu you select, and sticks on it until I refresh.

December 3 2008, 11:36:23 UTC 8 years ago

Dropdown should be fixed now on IE 7 -- see above for details, but looks like it was specific to the browser, nothing to do with security or the like.

As for the Safari iPhone browser doing something odd as well, that's a little distressing, especially since I've got no way to test fixes. If the IE 7 fix I just put in place doesn't fix this as well (we could be very lucky), I'll see if I can do some digging and find out what's going on, though without a test platform I can't make promises unfortunately.

December 6 2008, 07:37:32 UTC 8 years ago

It is resolved here, yes. It also seems to be working correctly on the iPhone/Safari combo.

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