:: Welcome to the NEW Look of Lakeville Weather!
After over a month of "beta" testing and fighting with different browser quirks and wrestling out code problems, we have renovated our website. We hope you like the new look and feel of the site, and enjoy the new content as well. Here is a rundown of the "features" we included in what we refer to as Lakeville Weather 2.0 :
The new site was designed for publication via the Movable Type platform, which I intend to describe a little more in detail in a future post. Some of those details are included below. Lakevilleweather.com is best viewed on 1024x768 screen size in Firefox, Mozilla, or Opera.
Some notes on design:
Skip this part if you don't care about geeky webpage stuff
In creating the three-column layout for the home page, and dual column layout for the content pages, we ran into the infamous Internet Explorer (IE) bugs in the way floating elements are handled. Our new design is CSS-based xhtml (currently under review and checking for validation purposes...watch for the validation logo coming soon!) Each element of design is "powered" by Movable Type's (our publishing platform) ability to pull in separate modules or files to a template page for display construction. For example, the left menu is a module, as is the footer, the masthead, and any element that is repeated on each page of content. This allows us to have the ability to make a change to one module, and therefore change content on multiple pages at once.
Placing the modules on the page is easy, as is alignment and float syntax in CSS. However, IE does not like to obey the syntax. Since 60% of our viewers access lakevilleweather.com via IE, we had to make some compromises. In order for the content to all "fit" on the pages, many of the graphics had to be shrunken down from standard size (640x480), otherwise IE would float the right column to the bottom of the page where it can have the full page width to display content. This brings up page size/resolution. Our stats show that the most common screen resolution used by viewers is 1024x768 at 63%. All other screen sizes and resolutions shared less than 10% commonality, so we aimed for a viewable area that incorporates the browser viewable area and a "sidebar program" like AIM that people commonly have open at the same time. This limited our browser viewable area to around 800-850px width-wise. As a result our format (column-wise) goes 200 : 400 : 200, or 200 : 600, depending on 3- or 2- column layout. Since IE takes screen resolution into account in displaying elements on a page, it forces the floats to break position rules so each element can be viewed in its entirely with a vertical scroll. Blah!
The bottom line is this: lakevilleweather.com is best viewed at 1024x768 in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Mozilla, or just about any browser except Internet Explorer. However, if you use IE at this resolution, you will see content in proper layout. If you view us at a smaller resolution in IE, the layout will be broken. Our website was built for Firefox/Mozilla code standards.