AAAS Redesign

Complete. I was able to perform this redesign in record time, especially considering how long the previous redesign took. Still, it too a bit of effort and I made a number of changes to the template provided to us by AAAS. In the end, though, I think the switch was well worth it.

Site structure
I moved a lot of things around. The new design uses a lot of javascript to generate the navigation elements. One of the scripts determines what navigational elements to activate based on the href of the current page. I had to make a number of modifications to get this working on our site since we're not under the AAAS hierarchy. I think this is one area where better content organization will benefit us greatly. I've already moved a couple of documents and sections around so that I can take advantage of this menuing system. There's still a number of documents that should be relocated, though, and I expect we'll be spending a few months figuring that out.

I've also changed the staging server hierarchy to better mimic the development/production server. All html directories have been placed back inside the top-level directory (HTML). On the plus side this better integrates the content on the site. On the down side it will require more work to ensure accurate links, etc., if any of this content is going to be repurposed. This isn't too much of a problem at present, however, since the sections in question (namely the online tools) haven't been updated in a long time.

Other random modifications
I made some improvements to the usability and scripting. Two of the biggest things conceptually (seeing as they're fairly minor in reality) being the usage of +/- indicators on the left-side nav to indicate expandable main menu items as opposed to links and highlighted elements within the expanded menus. I think these changes greatly enhance the menuing system. I've managed to keep our site tools on the left-side menu so that they are still easily accessed and probably easier to see overall than the previous design.

I made a large number of changes to the overall code structure and I think it's now much more readable than it was originally. I've unified the stylesheets into a single stylesheet that handles all the major browsers. I'm hoping to remove our "Print this page" link by using stylesheets to generate a printer-friendly version of the documents on the client side.

Best of all I've done all this without affecting the look of the site. I'm having one minor problem with the width of the content area, but it's hardly noticable … especially after looking at the changes some of the other directorates have made.

We're sending a list of corrections and suggestions for improvement to Kelly Gayden next week. The list ended up being longer than I expected, but the majority of what's in there are minor requests.

When I have time I'll prepare the work I've done so that I can send it back to Kelly. Hopefully the upgrades will make the site easier to manage. After that I want to see if I can get rid of some of the table-based layout code in favor of stylesheet-based code. I think it will significantly improve the managability of the site's code.

Mac weirdness
This one is a bit annoying. IE for the mac (am I still working around this dead program?) was randomly setting the width of some pages to about triple the size of the browser window. It turns out that there's a bug when a div element is floated and contains two block elements inside it. In this instance IEMac stretches the width of the parent element in an ungodly manner. This was a problem because of the right-side content I had to repurpose when preparing for the redesign. I ended up working around the problem by having IE just display these elements inline rather than floated.