Blog

Etikette & Web UI

February 16, 2010

I've been a web developer for a long time. My work progressed from user interface, to the server-side scripting, to databases. As my work became more specialized, however, my web UI skills emaciated. Recently I had the opportunity to give them a workout when I implemented the new design for Etikette.

By "a long time" I mean more than a decade. That means, when I first started doing this, the default background of HTML documents was an ugly gray and people often covered it up with really bad tiles. Soon after, people decided it was a good idea to use HTML tables to do page layout. Print designers started handing over Photoshop files and, if you were lucky, they set up the guides properly or even exported the file to table-based HTML.

Yes, Etikette's focus is on print design. No, we didn't use HTML tables. Yes, I can do tableless web layout and CSS.

I actually developed the whole Etikette site from the final design in a long Friday night, which is to say that there is some clean-up that I'd like to do. There's still a lot of inline CSS I should move to the global stylesheet. The rollovers and photography portfolio are hand-coded Javascript (do people even do that anymore?) and I'd like to swap them out and use jQuery. I'd also like to set up the site in a proper content management system like Wordpress or Drupal too.

Buy some custom invitations and announcements and maybe we'll get around to that clean-up.