This one's a doozy. I like the look of the new design well enough, but I absolutely hate the actual coding. I just don't understand why someone would design a web site using nested tables these days (up to 6 or 7 levels deep in some places). I could have looked past a single table setting up the columns and such … maybe even two-level tables. But this thing is just horribly designed. And as if the structure weren't bad enough, the code itself is ugly and, in more than one case, invalid. I've done my best to go through and clean up the code as best as I could. Some code couldn't be touched without f'ing up the layout, but I think I've done a decent job of getting things prettied up and well-formed (considering the limitations).
I hate the methods being used by AAAS to formulate a template as well. The method they use to make it so people can't destroy the layout are ugly at best. The choice of what to place in include files and how to group things just seems completely random. I've created a pretty decent include structure that I'm going to try and pass along to Kelly to see if she'll replace the currently crappy template files. I think it would go a long way towards making the site easier to maintain.
If I have time I'm going to try and make a more CSS-oriented design. I've already shown what I can do with the CCMS site. If I can create a cleaner template using mostly CSS I think I may be able to convince Kelly the benefits of such a system. Of course, I don't know if she or anybody has time to reimplement the template in such a manner. I believe the whole reason things ended up this way is because deadlines seem to be more important than quality work … which I guess is true just about anywhere.
On the plus side the CSS file pretty much uses only classes and identifiers. No more p styles or h1 styles making my life that much harder. There was a single td style that was giving me problems, but I was able to eliminate that with hardly any problems. I'll have a lot more flexibility in setting up the styles for our site, which is great because they have once again specified an incredibly tiny font size for the content areas. The downside to their usage of CSS, though, is pretty big. They're using javascript to write out the CSS link because they wanted to use different stylesheets depending on the browser. This despite the fact that the stylesheets were amazingly similar. I was able to overcome the problem by using the !imporant declaration in a few places (it appears that the second stylesheet was targetted towards Nav4 users … ick, luckily Nav4 ignores the !important declaration). Also, in my opinion the stylesheets were not well written, declaring the same style for the same element in different states. It made for some difficult reading and I spent some time cleaning it up so that it's now easier to tell what's modified in the various states.
I've been trying to find out what constraints we'll be working under with the new design but I guess nobody's really talked it over. Kelly told me she's been getting conflicting instructions and is trying to clarify things. I've gone ahead and made some variations on the template for review by our staff. Hopefully Kelly will get back to me soon. I'd like to know what kind of constraints I'll be working under. No matter the response I'm definitely going to want to make some modifications. It obviously hadn't been considered that the templates would be applied across hundreds of documents. I can't believe a site design would be created without consideration of variations in display that would accommodate a wide range of content such as that available on the various AAAS Web sites.
At any rate, I've already taken the first step towards application of the template. I've applied the template that has no right or left side editable regions. I had to make changes to some of the documents since there were a few that did actually use these areas. No doubt I'll be making a number of adjustments over the next few months to accommodate this design. I would like to apply the design and make it live by the end of next week. I don't really see any major need to go through as extensive of a preparation period as was done for the previous design. I believe our current structure will hold up well enough under the new design. That's not to say that no changes will occur, I just think we'll be able to gradually refine our site over the next few months as we work to better integrate in the new design. It's what I had hoped to do after the previous redesign … but time constraints always seem to hamper our efforts.
