So here it is, WolfieZero.com; my own personal site with my own personal design that I did from the very chicken scratching that’s it my mind!
It has been a while coming for me personally, the project overall is something of a little over five years work with the actual design being only about a month and a bit of work.
Crazy!
I’ve always been busy with other projects that I’ve never really made the time to build WolfieZero.com, added with the issue of I’m a perfectionist and get bored easily with my own personal ideas; it took a while to settle, and keep settled, on something. But it’s one of those things that I chose to over-come. So you may say I am a little chuffed with myself.
I want to give a little in-sight to the approach of the design as I think when designers/coders release a site they never seem to give reasons, but to me, design differs from art in that there is a certain degree of “science” (for want of a better word) to it rather than art that opinions can differ for many reasons, from artist to critic, art is subjective. Design is subjective too, but there is certain ideas that run in it that are good ideas and bad ideas; art can sometime pose bad ideas as good ideas depending on the subject matter.
Designing… With a Twist
So with WolfieZero.com I wanted to do something a little different from the start that was unique to me, which ironic as every good designer wants to do something unique. But I approached this from looking at me personally; I’m a tidy person that love minimalism, but can never achieve it so goes for the next best thing of organised look and a place for everything.
If you look at the front page of WolfieZero.com, I got a few items that relate to me personally; my photos, my links, my music and my gaming. Trying to include these on the front page along with the blog items was a bit of a logistical nightmare, but with the removal of some items and looking at minimal approach in marketing that is “give them a taster and then let them make the move” I went for it providing only a sample of everything on the front-page. I’ve still yet to include some important bits such as a portfolio page on there (and the site in general), but I left those to later to just see how I feel and them make the improvements as I see fit.
The colour scheme is an interesting one as when I told people about it and showed them previews of the site, it was a mix bag of reactions from single-people; although they though it was odd to have a masculine design with a hot-pink/purple look, the offset with black and white worked. That and the minimal approach to the design and lack of “fluffiness” to the design helped; also added a few layers of noise affect to texture the site, it gave it that rough edge that was also very modern and clean.
HTML Controversy?
Now, on the coding front I’d like to talk about something controversial in the front-end; two bits controversial actually that inter-link with each other. Support for Internet Explorer 6 and the use of HTML5 with no shiv!
Originally when finalising the last draft on the front-end code I posed the question of if I should support IE6 or not; it came back as a no. When it came to the final run of code, the site almost worked in IE6 with a few annoying bits that also had issues in IE7. Seemed silly not to fix for one and then not care about the other. But with less than 5% market share in the UK, really, why bother with IE6? It’s the challenge that most designers and some front-end developers shy away from as they find it difficult to code to. But I think it’s thanks to my strict ideal of coding where I limit the use of all HTML tags that are meaningless help; you have very clean semantic markup with limited use of classes, ids, <div>s and <span>s.
With the HTML5 shivs and not using it to fix IE6 support it’s simple; I don’t use the tags! Seems stupid to write markup that allows you but when you have to support older browsers that don’t support it that are still in major use (IE7) and you then use Javascript to fix a problem; it’s fundamentally broken. I may one day move to using tags like <header> and <article> but for now there is no need. I could go back to using XHTML Strict coding that this site already uses, but then it breaks due to the site having to have a MIME type of xml/application (90% of sites use text/html incorrectly for XHTML) that IE6 can’t understand. If you want to read further into this then I suggest taking a look at ‘Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful‘ written by Ian Hickson
Okay, a little bit much info there, even for most designers (hopefully front-end coders understand even if they didn’t know that before (I only learned a few weeks ago)), but it’s interesting none-the-less for me. But to put it bluntly…
WolfieZero.com works in IE6 due to being very strict with the coding standers I set out for myself and the site runs on HTML5 perfectly in browsers IE6-9, Firefox 3.6 and Webkits… I don’t know what version… but it works without fixes in Javascript meaning that WolfieZero.com really does degrade gracefully on all systems… I hope!
(Constructive) Criticism, Please!
I’m really happy with the site, but I do hope to make constant improvements as I learn new things or want to give random stuffs ago. Now I laid the foundations, I might be realigning and redesigning the look of the site; hell, if enough people like it I might release it as a theme to download for WordPress!
I love to hear back from people and their opinion on the site and any issue they may have found. I learn from my mistakes so if people are honest and provide feedback that I can really use then it means so much to me. None of this flaming of “I don’t like it”, though the opposite is greatly welcomed!