Monday, October 13, 2003

New NT Gateway frontpage

Many thanks to Steve Walton, Holger Szesnat, Stephen Carlson, Helen-Ann Hartley and Jim Davila for their feedback on the experimental new front page for the NT Gateway. It seems to be popular, so I've decided to implement it. One of the advantages appears to be that it helps users to get more quickly to where they want to be on the site, i.e. everything is one click away. If you haven't had the chance to give your feedback yet, it's not too late. Let me know what you think because I'll be doing more adjusting yet.

In my redesign, I've tried to keep to W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional but I've failed; this comes partly, I'm afraid, from working with FrontPage. I used to hand-code everything (as did Viola when she did some work on the site a couple of years ago) but have recently done most of the updating on FrontPage for speed's sake. For updates, it's OK, but for this kind of redesign it's not so good. But I'm gradually stripping out some of the rubbish I've introduced and will make sure it validates again asap.

Note that I'm keeping the old design (if I was into marketing, I'd call it the "classic design"!) for all the other pages except the Blog. I think it works well there, where one may want to continue to navigate around the site, but needs it compactly on the left. But there's a little work still to be done there, e.g. to introduce a Weblog button at the top.

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