Reworking Andy's Personal Site - 3
The lower level pages of my site are clearly going to present the biggest problems. Having sorted out my navigation "metaphor", such as it is, with the "further on" links on the right and the "up" links on the left, I'm left with the nasty feeling that the layout only works for abut ten percent of the current pages.
My first ever pages used what I then fondly thought were rather natty "brass plates" at the bottom, .gif images with the links as image maps. They gave a sense of closure to the pages, but were a real pain to maintain. Then I went to the javascript drop-down menus, which were easier to maintain, but required a "noscript" alternative (which I often forgot to update) and which no-one much used anyway.
After the first couple of years, I started using masthead text images for titles, because they forced the early browsers to show my text at the width I wanted, rather than scrunching it up. And Somewhere along the line, I started using the left margin image just for some relief, and to help users of the "morris" section know where they were in the site. Well, mostly that's what I did, but there are some cases in the "places" section where I've used the left-hand margin to hold a title, sideways on, and used text for the title at the top.
I need all the pages to look the same. This is going to be a real wrench, but if I don't get all the pages in the same format I'll jest never catch up with the maintenance. I like the margin images for differentiation, and although the mastheads aren't strictly necessary, I like them as well. I'll keep both, and add them where they don't exist.
I've used some light-on-dark schemes for some of the places and robotics. I'm going to stick to just six pastel backgrounds and remake the ones that don't fit. And, sadly, the sideways titles have to go. I lavished a lot of care and attention on them as a special effect. I'm not a designer, but I got through art at school with good grades by doing things like calligraphy. I really like a lot of the effects, but they get in the way of the navigation. This is mostly a content site, and should look like that.
However, there's one other thing I can do to spice things up. A number of the pages just have text on them. And I've several gigs worth of digital photos reaching back to 1997. There ought to be a decent appropriate photo for each text page, and adding 13k or so to the load isn't that big a deal nowadays. Even my Nepali visitors on their 9k6 links can cope with that. It should be fun - and if I'm not having fun on my personal site, then why am I bothering?