Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Development: Relaunched

Finally, introducing Version 3.0 of Wide-Eyed & Laughing.

First off, let me apologize. When I shut the site down on the weekend after Thanksgiving (Nov 25-27), I was not expecting that it would stay down for next two weeks. The delay was partly due to the design, but mostly caused by getting caught up in other life activities—my mom got a nasty looking eye infection; some urgent modifications for a clients web site; etc..  That said, my goal this week was just to re-open the site, regardless of status.

So here you have it, Version 3.0: of Wide-Eyed & Laughing. There are still some rough edges here and there. I’m playing with using custom status assignments, and custom fields in Expression Engine to limit the display data. What it means, is that I’m hoping to add far more data to the website, things such as: recently purchased books, music, etc. You’ll see, the new banner section below, that highlights recent books, music, television, and websites. I have similar sections on movies and toys (technology); that will be accessible just through the site map.

My goal was to both display more and less. I wanted less text, more imagery, more sectional data, but less clutter. To that regards, I’ve moved the navigation from the side bar to the top, where it is hidden until you need it. I have some more work to do on that as well, the current version is not accessible to text-readers; but I’m fiddling around with the javascript and the javascript frameworks, to come up with an option that still slides the menu up and down or between visible/non-visible states but keeps the full menu available to text-readers, even when it is hidden.

I’ll do a real write-up about the new version once, I completed all the tweaks and have everything working as desired. But you don’t have to wait; almost everything except the gallery has been converted. So have at it. 

Update 12/19/2006: I’m going to write a series of articles about the development of the site using Expression Engine, and Moo.fx, so stay tuned.

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