Work wanted a website in an hour today.
Their previous version of this particular site was the image from the event poster, with links mapped onto it. It was mere moments before my progressive enhancement / responsive design OCD kicked in. The site in question is to advertise this year's University of Lincoln Grad Ball, and is little more than an online poster. So here goes.
1530
Marked up the page, with HTML5 tags and the content from the poster, using
currently non-existent classes where needed, and also including a few non-
existant images. Added my own mini CSS reset for the elements I was using.
1545
Cut the couple of images I needed out of the poster png and uploaded them.
Spent a while trying to find something to match the obscure Mac font that had
been used on the poster. Impact was close, but didn't quite cut it at small
sizes. Played with weighting and letter spacing for ages, but eventually
picked a font from Google Web Fonts that did
the trick and styled all the typography related stuff.
1605
Aligned, padded, margined and weighted everything as I wanted. Remembered to
use a HTML5 enabling script so versions of IE lte8 would actually bother to style things properly.
1625
Took a step back to look at content. The organisation of it was great for a
poster, where you can pretty much see everything at once, but in any scenario
where scrolling is a possibility, the most important stuff needs to go at the
top. So I rearranged some things.
1630
Used CSS to hide a couple of elements that would do more harm than good on a
device with a small display. Used media queries to show them for displays with
a greater width than 480px. With help for IE, of course.
Nasty, dirty cheating
One of the images I used consisted mostly of text, with a few images plonked
around it. I didn't have the energy to recreate this in a two-column list,
especially not with the apparently randomly floating images. The image is
only used for 480px+ of course. Mobile get a list. Unfortunately, I just
used display:none. So mobile browsers are still loading the image. I hate
me, too. But hey, I had an hour. It's better than the whole site being an
image.
READ MORE ABOUT RESPONSIVE DESIGN.
I wrote that in capitals, because it is not a suggestion.
And, if you're University of Lincoln final year student, get your tickets for the Grad Ball, and resize your browser window while you're there. It's going to be the best one yet, as they say every year.
It doesn't really seem like much when summarised like this, but I do wish I was paid more than £6 an hour.
Last modified: