Reply To: Fantastic news.

[Rezwan]

Have you read Jeff Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards? I’ve adopted that philosophy.

I don’t think we have to compromise on style, but it may be your approach to design is over-complicating things.

amcnea wrote: Now, to give an example from the demo. Things like the font, link color, background, etc would be the base. Then the top black area would be one sub-section, followed by the blue sub-section, then there is the article sub-section below and to the left, a module sub-section below and to the right, and finally a footer sub-section at the bottom. Then in the module section there is a Paypal, login, and Photo sub-sub-sections.

If you start by designing the sub-sub-sections and work your way out to the broadest sections, then as you alter the code in the base area, this will change the appearance of EVERY sub-sub-section. Text starts to wrap, things get pushed off of where there supposed to be, etc. Then you have to go through and modify the CSS for each sub-sub-section to be compliant with the new base CSS.

That’s what I’m talking about. You broke it down beautifully. Yes, in the css sheets, you start with the base css. Then, having decided on the different divs of your site, you add code necessary to differentiate them. It’s like cell differentiation.

If you’re very concerned about straightjacketing the site and making sure things fit precisely into eachother, you’ll run into design problems. If you relax that standard, you have much more freedom.

Then the analogy becomes the website as a person. You have a body. You are naked. You want to go out in public. So…you put on a hat. That’s the header. It goes on your head. You get some matching shoes. Footer. You put a necklace on – the menu. A shirt, a vest, a jacket, some pants or skirt. Your skin tone is your skin tone, determined by your body. But say you all of a sudden want blue legs – you only change the div “tights” to blue. And so on.

But you have to start out with that approach in mind, otherwise you may code in some messy entangled code. And then you’re dependent on Joomla’s interface to fix things and out of touch with the complex code beneath it.

The page you designed was actually simple enough. You had a header, a menu bar, and that blue animation thing. The body, a left column, a right column, the bits. A footer. With a website, if you have it clearly defined and with the expression engine approach, you could just as easily place the header at the bottom and the footer on top, or the animation on the bottom.

Oh, again, my philosophy to let things float. Not try to constrict them so much. Another body analogy. It’s the holidays. And you go to people’s houses, and you eat a lot of food. You want to let your belt out. Websites now and then go to different browsers and they have to let their belts out. Best to put spandex in the clothes and give them some breathing room. If you design with that in mind, you’ll be far more flexible, and still look cool. Just let go of the interlocking control aspect and go for a general fit.

Furthermore all this is complicated by multi-browser support.

All the more reason to keep it simple and think mostly of accessibility and the future.

[re: image]Anyways, what all this means is that the image should be good for use.

Good to know.

I don’t know, I am not really a fan of insulting or luring people. Can’t you just say that your a non-profit and what your looking for?

I did, in the text. I’m just wondering about which option to click in the drop down box that straightjacketed me into choosing an amount offered. The lowest it had was $50K.