Reply To: Fantastic news.

[Rezwan]

My Dear AMcnea, I hold you in the highest esteem! It pains me that I have abused you with uncalled for remarks. Sincerely.

This exchange has filled me with a sense of promise, and the feeling that a beautiful site is close at hand. It pains me that I have expressed myself defensively or grumpily. You, on the other hand, have given me nothing but joy by, first of all being available and willing to do some serious design, and secondly by coming up with a design that I’ve already started to incorporate. On top of that joy, you have now given me relief with the admission that you’ve given up on Joomla with me.

We’ve been thinking aloud on key issues and we’re making great progress. I feel we’re converging to functional harmony.

EXCELLENT point about the divs and the base css. I am in agreement.

The divs have not all been defined, and many of them are improperly named.

Like, to my embarassment, I have a div class “bluecontent” which was my temporary box to hold side content. We’ve all cringed at it.

First of all, the name shouldn’t relate to the color. It should relate to the function. Second, we will want to later differentiate say, the paypal box from the recent posts box, so it’s terrible to put everything in a bluecontent box. The boxes may all start out looking alike, but here nomenclature and div differentiation is important.

Anyway, more on divs, but too much to write. I’ll call you. Let me know a good time.

For the base css – I like your taste so far. You want specific action:

1) Come up with a color palette.
2) Choose fonts, sizes and colors for the basic elements, e.g., h1, h2, h3, h4; p, quotes, bullets, and variations of those in sub categories.
3) Bullet variations – I am hopeless with bullet points. Lists come up a lot on this site. Would love some nice bullets.
4) Some box designs for those bits (specific divs!) on the side. Like the donate box, or the member log in box. (actually, I want to keep a line for member action on the top of the site next to the search box. Any reason why you left that off the top of your design? A usability issue? Want to put that on the side somewhere?)

5) Mast head, logo area
6) navigation – But we’re still figuring out the navigation of the site. That’s an info arch issue, right? Anyway, I do like that treehugger.com approach with info/interact/act.
7) Animation/storyboard space: I like the blue bar with animation you have – but then again, don’t want anything moving on the screen unless acted upon. Perhaps, under the menu, you could do a big blue rectangle taking up 2/3 of the page, and have visible the options, and then as a person clicks on things, the picture and info come up, until you click through all for that thing. So the pieces unfold like a story, at your command.

This might satisfy JShell’s interest in mystery, because you have to take some action to let the pictures unfold.

Structure – I’m fine with your basic header, nav band, some columns (2-4, depending) and a footer. Or, a folded page, with more segments as you go down. Do you have any structural, div related suggestions?

Photos/gallery/video divs – another conversation.

Usability. Yes, zeldman was about the back end. The book on usability that I like is Janice Redish’s letting go of the words. Something I have a really hard time doing – but one day. So much I have to pare down and streamline on the site.

According to the Redish book, we have to start with creating “persona”s – what is the typical person looking for on our site. That will be another topic thread!

Thanks again for all your hard work and constructive conversation. I truly appreciate it.