Luxagraf

So the new luxagraf is finally ready for prime time. Hopefully the site is a bit faster now as there’s more aggressive caching and much better code running the backend. When I started I wasn’t planning to change the look, just redo the backend, but then we got a new bed. I kept staring at what you see in the image above and thinking, you know, I should go back to the very old brown design (and note that that image was very carefully framed to hide the fact that we currently have our old queen size bed sitting inside the new king bedframe, because we hate shopping).

Anyway, at the same time I sat down to restore luxagraf’s brownness, I also happened to be working on a Webmonkey tutorial about some of the cool new tricks you can do with CSS 3 (note: if that means nothing to you, skip the next two paragraphs).

I’ve always sort of wanted rounded corners, but then they also seemed so, well, too feminine for luxagraf. So while I was exploring CSS 3’s rounded corners tools one of the demos showed an element with just two rounded corners and I thought huh, now there’s an idea — the best of both worlds.

Of course good old internet explorer doesn’t support, well, anything even remotely new. So if you’re still using IE, you won’t notice any rounded corners. Sorry about that, them’s the breaks. Maybe grab a copy of Firefox and welcome yourself out of the dark ages.

That and I decided during this redesign that I really hate page headers, those inane images and logos that take up valuable screen real estate and really do nothing — what’s the point? So I took a tip from Jeff Croft and went for the vertical header set off to the side (and fear not, I sent Jeff some screenshots before I relaunched it and he said the similarities didn’t bother him).

At the moment comments don’t work. I’m still deciding if I want them or not. If you have strong feelings let me know the old school way, by e-mail. I’m also not sure if I like the top menu tucked up there at the top. It might move at some point, though I’m not sure where.

There are still probably a few bugs around. Please e-mail me if you run into an error page or something that looks strange (unless it’s in IE 7, which I already know is pretty messed up. But I don’t have copy at the moment so oh well).

And of course let me know what you think. Unless you think it sucks, just keep that to yourself.