Essential Design

Moved.

History of page design (part I)

I have to admit I've been around the block a few times. I've been designing web pages since before we had tables, or even color in anything but pictures (and those were only in 16 colors). Back then, web pages had a header and paragraphs — all in one big column.

People who were really determined to have a table with columns had to use the "pre" (preformatted) tag, which acted like a typewriter, and put things exactly where you typed them. Since we didn't have colors then, everything was in whatever colors your monitor supported. The pre tag still exists, so I can give you an idea of how we did columns and how they looked back then.

| Column1  | Column2  | Column3  |
| text row | text row | text row |
| text row | text row | text row |
| text row | text row | text row |

Pretty ugly, I'd say. I'll bet you can guess why designers didn't bother to do web pages in columns!

But things soon improved. I'll tell you all about that in the next installment.

In case you are noticing changes

The front page is now the same template as my front page. I'll be using this area to test all my main site designs. The samples will be moving to this template, since it has some fixes for things that were causing problems.

Live at last!

Welcome. This site is mostly a test site for designs. This site uses no tables, except for the MT calendar. It should also work in any browser and on any reasonable screen size (obviously it won't look very good in a five-pixel wide screen).

This design and all the samples in the links column have been done using the exact same template. Only the CSS changes. Although this has been designed for the MT blog, a similar design can be done any blogs, and even for regular web sites.

I'll be doing some fancier CSS in the future, and some different templates, but if you browse around the samples I have up now you'll see how much even simple changes in just the CSS can change the look of a site.

What I've asked on my main blog is for people to come test the pages so I can fine-tune. I've tested in all the browsers I have, and I am using valid XHTML and CSS, but I may need to work around browser bugs, so I would very much like to know if this site causes any! If you've come here directly, I'd also like to ask you to browse around and let me know if you find anything buggy. Thank you.

I do not have either Konquerer or MSIE 6 and get hits from both on my main site, so I'd really appreciate comments from people running those browsers, and since I'm on a PC, from anyone using Mac or UNIX versions of any browser. Thanks!

Last test post

This blog isn't here. Really. It's all in your imagination. However, this blog will be here tomorrow or the next day. So, if you happened upon it by accident, or by following me back here through your site meter, do come back in a day or two. There will be some real stuff here then.

About ready to roll out

Just doing a few more posts for testing purposes.

Here is a nice sentence that I can repeat endlessly for testing purposes. Here is a nice sentence that I can repeat endlessly for testing purposes.Here is a nice sentence that I can repeat endlessly for testing purposes.

Here is a nice sentence that I can repeat endlessly for testing purposes. Here is a nice sentence that I can repeat endlessly for testing purposes.

And we are testing again

This one is just to put two posts in the same day.

Just another test

Doing trackbacks and comments with myself... how egotistical can one get?

Test for date templates II

This is a post to test the monthy template and calendarThis is a fake link to a page. This here is a citation. blah blah blah blah

And yet another paragraph, just to test some more stuff. Here is a nice sentence that I can repeat endlessly for testing purposes. Here is a nice sentence that I can repeat endlessly for testing purposes. Here is a nice sentence that I can repeat endlessly for testing purposes.

Testing... 1, 2, 3

How cool. I'm visiting the past. This is (in addition to being backdated to make some monthly archives) yet another test.

Here is a nice sentence that I can repeat endlessly for testing purposes.

Here's a blockquote. Here is a nice sentence that I can repeat endlessly for testing purposes. Here is a nice sentence that I can repeat endlessly for testing purposes.