Shiny New Things

[denny]

helenic and I have finished coding up the website for Shiny Ideas. Any feedback would be very welcome - although I haven't checked it for IE bugs yet, so they won't greatly surprise me (if you check it with IE and find no bugs, that'd be worth knowing) :)

http://shinyideas.co.uk/design/

In other shiny-new-things news, my new netbook arrived today. It is one of these. I have called it Zig*. It's impressively tiny, but with an almost tolerable keyboard size, which isn't bad going. I hear the battery life is poor, but I've not really played with it yet as I've been busy with the website. Tomorrow (well, later today), it will be Ubuntu Netbook Remix time for little Zig!

And now, it's dawn bedtime!

* as in 'take off every', not as in 'and zag' - although I do like to move it, move it.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Typo/missing words for you:

Shiny Ideas is a new partnership, so we don't [have] many items in our porfolio which show our combined work yet. For now, here are some of the projects either of us has [have] worked on independently.

[denny]

Thanks!

I must shame-facedly admit that helenic got the second one right when she wrote the copy, and I changed it because it didn't sound right to me. I should know better than to correct the Cambridge graduate's English :)

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

D'oh! :-p

[wildeabandon]

if you check it with IE and find no bugs, that'd be worth knowing

No such luck, I'm afraid - things are on top of one another in ways that look silly (and different from Mozilla, which is the only other browser I have at work). I'll try to give some actually useful feedback once I've mainlined a bit more caffiene and can thus see and think.

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

IE6?

[wildeabandon]

7

[denny]

I've put a fix in place for the IE box-model glitches on the 'heading' images ('you make them, we build them', etc) - has that improved matters at all? Supposedly it shouldn't be necessary above IE5.5, but it seemed worth a try.

[wildeabandon]

It looks right in Services & Portfolio, but not in Home, About Us, and Contact Us. I'm not sure if that's a change from before though, as I only looked at the front page then before going to Mozilla.

[denny]

That's very helpful, thank you - I think I've isolated the cause now, and it should be easy to fix.

Whether the fix then breaks something else is another matter :)

[wildeabandon]

I like it. It certainly "feels" shiny. Here are a few niggles, which are as much preferences as anything else - feel free to ignore.

The "Business Process Analysis" paragraph on the service page could do with a rephrase - it uses the word business three times in a short paragraph, twice in one sentence.

I don't like it saying "The Van Needs quote system is another example of white-labelling." as it assumes that you've read and remembered the page about OG, which may not be the case. I also don't know what white-labelling means. Will your clients? If can make a guess from context, but it could be more obvious.

On the Mobrool page, "CMS/CDS (content management system/content delivery system)" might look better as "CMS/CDS (content management/delivery system)"

I notice that Helen's sites are written about in the form "I did this" and yours are (mostly) written about as "This was done." Of course that's more obvious to me, because I know what sites you've both worked on, but you might want to make it consistent.

[denny]

I'm not feeling the copy-fixing love for the BPA paragraph right now, but I'll try looking at it again later.

I had intended to reword the Van Needs description, for exactly the reasons you mention - done now.

Not sure about the CMS/CDS expansion... it's clumsy, but wouldn't it look weird without all the words in the expanded versions?

I evaded the first person on the portfolio pages because we can't say 'we' yet. Helen went with the 'house style' of keeping it personal and not passive. I'm not sure if we're going to try to homogenise them, or just replace them with stuff 'we' have done as swiftly as possible :)

Thanks for all the pointers!

[denny]

things are on top of one another in ways that look silly

That's about what I was expecting :) That and ugly grey boxes in some places.

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

I think it looks great!

FYI here's a quick check on how it looks in various browsers:

http://browsershots.org/http://shinyideas.co.uk/design/

IE8 seems fine, although you can only see the top half. It seems to break in IE6 (still used a lot in business): http://browsershots.org/screenshots/46312504ceea5a3b1cfe04a3eb3548f1/
You might need a different stylesheet using conditional statements (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537512(VS.85).aspx#syntax), although this javascript fixup for IE might help (http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/).

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

Lol at the IE 4 screenshot - says it all about that browser really:

http://api.browsershots.org/png/original/e8/e81ca39a1764ae00ef010b71ffcdf372.png (http://api.browsershots.org/png/original/e8/e81ca39a1764ae00ef010b71ffcdf372.png)

[helenic]

I'm intending to create an IE stylesheet - different ones for different browsers if necessary.

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

Cool, well from what I can see it primarily is just IE that needs sorting (not a big surprise as MS never seems to follow the standards quite the same as everyone else) - the other (modern) browsers seem to work well with your styling. :-)

[denny]

I had completely forgotten about the existence of ie7-js, thank you very much for the reminder. I've just put it into the homepage and it looks like it's fixed almost all of the IE6 bugs. Even IE5.5 appears to have rendered pretty much correctly, according to browsershots.org anyway. Epic win!

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

Hurrah - glad I could help. :-)

[denny]

Unfortunately on further investigation I have no idea whether this is true or not. The screenshots on browsershot.org looked really really promising, but an install of IE6 on my new netbook suggests that the ie7-js actually made things worse. That said, the install of IE6 seems to be a bit confused about whether it's IE6 or IE7, so I'm not sure whether to believe anything it says.

[synthclarion.livejournal.com]

When I load it in IE, all I see is a tiled image of giant throbbing cocks.

[denny]

That's IE.

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

So this is now going to add to the 138 pages found through Google that contain both "giant throbbing cocks" and "Internet Explorer", and appears to be the only non-pornographic one. Care to fix that? ;-p

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

Works fine in Konqueror 4.2.4, but breaks in Netsurf 2.1 ( http://www.netsurf-browser.org - not sure if it's worth you fixing as I suspect that only a fraction of a percentage point of net users are using it ).

While they were loading the page it showed a black box at the top of the page in the block where the helix and background then appear - might it be worth this background being a shade of blue so it's not such a jump white to black to blue?

Tested in IE8 and Firefox 3.5 on Windows 7 and it works fine on them.

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

Hmmm - came up in white on Firefox and Chrome on Windows - I guess the background colour isn't specified? (I've not checked the stylesheet...)

[denny]

The page background is black. The reason for that is so that if the page is shorter than the browser window, the bit at the bottom looks intentionally empty rather than accidentally empty, iyswim?

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

Kind of, I guess we'd be looking at some extreme resolution given the length of the page, in which case they'd better be using watchmaker's glasses... 8-D

[denny]

It happens on both the contact and contacted pages on my screens, and they're 'only' 1200px high. 30" displays are a bit above that, so might see it on one or two more pages. Admittedly it's mostly only designers that have those things so far, but then I wouldn't want to make Helen look silly in front of her peers ;)

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

30"? You really know how to make a man feel inadequate with his 15" laptop and 17" monitor. :-p

Then again, I remember you having that huge (and barely portable) 20" iiyama CRT monitor while we were at uni...

What you need is an upgrade...

[denny]

I have a pair of quite nice matching 19" (1280x1024) monitors sat here in their boxes, and also a very nice 20" (1600x1200), also in the box. Make me an offer :)

Re: What you need is an upgrade...

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

Hehe - when I saw the subject line in my inbox I nearly hit the "Junk" button before seeing it was from you... :-p

While the 19" sound very nice - I have nowhere to put them. My girlfriend grumbles every time she needs to get something from her shelf in my room due to the amount of stuff I have all over the place in there already... :-(

My inner geek is screaming at me to buy them though...

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

This screenshot shows what I mean: http://browsershots.org/screenshots/142becd6c342e0b49124c95b9a44449a/