html

When designing websites graphic designers often draw a neat picture in photoshop. The day to day use of a website greatly differs from this ideal scenario. The design shows a calm and readable site with demo text. But the actual website in use everything but serene and readable. The text style is usually the first aspect of a site that gets diluted. Both users and visitors create content or leave comments which just don't fit the initial picture painted by the designer. A lot of problems stem from the use of wysiwyg editors in content management systems. These editors usually grant their users a lot more freedom than a web designer wants. A properly configured wysiwyg editor should greatly limit the possibilities of the user to a few essential functions such as creating lists, inserting links and marking text as strong or emphasised.

However, many a time such wysiwyg editors are incorrectly configured. If users have too many text formatting options the result is text corruption. Because of their limited knowledge of html code, users mess up semantics, introduce a diversity of text styles, insert many incorrect tags and a plethora of inflated code and inline styles. The more creatively inclined user seems to have an urge to colour pieces of text, raise the text size, insert alternate fonts and create unused or endlessly nested tables into the content of your carefully designed site. Once users start copying and pasting from MS Word they introduce a visual cacaphony which seriously breaks the visual appease of your site. Sometimes it can even break the basic layout of your site and hinder search indexation.

Discussions on Drupal site optimisation are usually technical discussions. But many a time they boil down to philosophical discussions. Search engine optimisation (SEO) and performance tweaks aren't necessarily good for the manageability of your site or for your potential visitors. I ran across a couple of these dilemmas in recent days while trying to optimise my own site.

JS / CSS compression

On of the questions I struggled with is: "should I compress the javascript and css files?". From a performance perspective, the answer is a clear yes. The performance boost is minimal because the servers of my hosting provider have ample headroom. But any performance gain helps. I manage to reduce the number of http requests by 18 simply by combining all the css and js files into 1 file for js and 1 for css. However, because I still do lots of front-end development, I want my own website's css files to be readable by potential clients. If prospects want to judge my css coding skills they'll probably want to take a look at this site's css code to. Compressing the files also makes them very hard to read. And all the care I put into laying out the code neatly (alphabetical element properties, consistent commenting, consistent tagging, etc) is lost for the potential observer. Right now I decided to enable this performance tweak because the potential number of observers is really limited.

Code Culture has a brand-spanking new layout. My wonderful friends Leon and Rob from WAT Ontwerpers have concocted a colourful corporate identity, logo, and website design. The drupal theme for this website, I built myself. Though this is still a work in progress (and it probably will be a work in progress for the remainder of it's life), many of the elements of the new design are in place. Let me point out some highlights:

• The logo can be placed over any image and still retain it's expressive power. The header image can be altered to match a specific section's topic or style.
• Good old Helvetica is serving some nicely layed out text styles. Most (semantically relevant) html text elements have been molded to a calm well readable rhythm. Blockquotes, links, linespacing, indenting, lists, etc have all been carefully layed out.
• We have minimised wasted space by wrapping the text under the right column.
• To further demarcate sections and whitespace, we've added some nice supportive visuals to the layout.
• And don't forget the stuff most of us never see! Browser text resizing and print styles have been optimised.
• Cross browser support: the template has been tested in firefox, opera, safari, ie6 and ie7.

Afgelopen jaar is Interpay gefuseerd met een Duitse partner. Uw pintransacties worden nu dus afgehandeld door een Europese combinatie die Equens is gedoopt. Ik heb er in opdracht van Eden Design voor gezorgd dat een rimpelloze overgang van de Interpay- naar de Equens-vormgeving mogelijk was.