I’d like them too if they weren’t so light when not active.
Also, either my firebird install is screwy or something on this page is making form quick fill popups align VERY badly.
Argh. :-/
Oh…my…gosh. Ryan stinkin’ Abrams–where have you been?
I’ll try to make the colors a bit more managable. I’m totally open to suggestions for introducing color schemes to this site, by the way. As much as I’m a markup wank and okay at stick-with-what-works web design, I’m totally useless when it comes to colors and style, etc.
Sounds like an FB issue? I’m using 0.6.1 these days. I tried keeping up with the daily builds, but they’re just not stable enough for me–the web browser is my most-used application by far…
That’s cool. What happened to the line separating the content from the sidebar? I really liked that. I think maybe you should try to stick with complimentary colors to your light-blue links – check this out http://www.easyrgb.com/harmonies.php here put in this value:
R: 117
G: 153
B: 165
that will give you a bunch of complimentary colors to your link color. It’s a good cheat sheet
Ha! Jai, that’s exactly what I’ve been messing around with (hence the very subtle inclusion of colors on this site). I found it on Zeldman’s Externals…
I’m thinking about a total color scheme overhaul, though. The wedding is now 15 months behind us, so I think it’s time to make this site look less wedding-y.
Maybe I could throw a redesign contest.
Oh, regarding the vertical line: it was intersecting just under the arrow that points to “home”–only it was off center. It bugged me enough to pull it. I thought about putting it back, but in some other form. Hm.
Hey ken – you could probably do color schemes pretty easily… for now, just darken up the gray for the unselected items.
As to where I’ve been… well, around. Got lots of stuff going. Should probably blog about them sometime, but well, it’s easy not to. :-/
Did get a bike though. Trying to reduce my dependance on fossil fuels even more.
I like the mini-tabs on some sites, but I think (just my personal taste) it looked better before. I liked the simplistic but effective design.
BY THE WAY. I was searching for something on ‘project management’ and ‘open source’ and stumbled onto “Our Story”. That was a few months ago. After viewing your site and then some links to random other places (stopdesign.com, divintomark.org, and so on), I was inspired to refresh my knowledge of design.
And now I am working on something for my youth group. We are using Movable Type, among other things.
Thanks
Sean–glad to hear our site has been helpful to you. I’d love to hear how you’re using MT for your youth group site sometime (I had kicked around the idea of creating a website for our small group, but never got it off the ground).
We actually get a lot of inbound links on “open source project management.” In some ways, I feel bad that we’re in the top 10 for that search in Google. The entry I’d written by the same title was more about open source software for project management than it was about project management for open source software…or something.
Well I should clarify. We WILL (still in the planing stages) be using MT. I am new to it, and relearning PHP and all that. I have not touched web design in years, unless you count some simple form pages for random databases. The person that was handling it was going to use FrontPage with static pages. But she has been enlightened. Now she is behind me on using xhtml+css and MT/PHP. Whether we will go xhtml strict is still up in the air.
I was actually searching for open source software that could help with project management, so your entry was perfect.
Sean, any help you need with the youth site and MT you just ask me. I’m always up for helping the cause of the Gospel- and I sure do know MT inside and out (thanks muchly to Kenny over here).
K – I agree with sean. You may see it as bland, but your simple but effective design is so difficult for design dweebs (such as myself) to attain. I liked it before. Maybe a comprimise of tabs and simplicity is possible? and I still miss my separator line
re: “But she has been enlightened.”
Ha! Glad to hear! I would think, too, that accessibility would be a great sell for XHTML 1.0 + CSS. Not that XHTML necessarily brings accessibility to the table per se (you could just as easily use HTML 4.1 and be accessible), but the discipline of seperating structure and presentation goes a long way towards the process–something that is truly impossible with Microsoft Frontpage.
re: “Maybe a comprimise of tabs and simplicity is possible?”
Well, the tabs were a bit of a compromise. My biggest complaint about the previous design (aside from the fact that it didn’t use any cutting edge CSS tricks anyway) was that there was really no clear indication where I (as a user) was in the website. This, incidentally, was why I introduced the breadcrumb trail.
While the b/c trail was helpful, I don’t think it answered to the usability problem as much as I would have liked. I’m already using body id attributes to denote which “section” of the site a user was in–I figured, “why not take advantage of them?”
If you check out the CSS, the implementation is kind of neat. When you’re on the About page (or any of its derivatives), the CSS elements “line up” in such a way that the About link is highlighted. Ditto for all the other sections. Plus, you can tell where you are in the site by just glancing at the navigation bar.
I’d like them too if they weren’t so light when not active.
Also, either my firebird install is screwy or something on this page is making form quick fill popups align VERY badly.
Argh. :-/
Oh…my…gosh. Ryan stinkin’ Abrams–where have you been?
I’ll try to make the colors a bit more managable. I’m totally open to suggestions for introducing color schemes to this site, by the way. As much as I’m a markup wank and okay at stick-with-what-works web design, I’m totally useless when it comes to colors and style, etc.
Sounds like an FB issue? I’m using 0.6.1 these days. I tried keeping up with the daily builds, but they’re just not stable enough for me–the web browser is my most-used application by far…
That’s cool. What happened to the line separating the content from the sidebar? I really liked that. I think maybe you should try to stick with complimentary colors to your light-blue links – check this out http://www.easyrgb.com/harmonies.php here put in this value:
R: 117
G: 153
B: 165
that will give you a bunch of complimentary colors to your link color. It’s a good cheat sheet
Ha! Jai, that’s exactly what I’ve been messing around with (hence the very subtle inclusion of colors on this site).
I found it on Zeldman’s Externals…
I’m thinking about a total color scheme overhaul, though. The wedding is now 15 months behind us, so I think it’s time to make this site look less wedding-y.
Maybe I could throw a redesign contest.
Oh, regarding the vertical line: it was intersecting just under the arrow that points to “home”–only it was off center. It bugged me enough to pull it. I thought about putting it back, but in some other form. Hm.
Hey ken – you could probably do color schemes pretty easily… for now, just darken up the gray for the unselected items.
As to where I’ve been… well, around. Got lots of stuff going. Should probably blog about them sometime, but well, it’s easy not to. :-/
Did get a bike though. Trying to reduce my dependance on fossil fuels even more.
I like the mini-tabs on some sites, but I think (just my personal taste) it looked better before. I liked the simplistic but effective design.
BY THE WAY. I was searching for something on ‘project management’ and ‘open source’ and stumbled onto “Our Story”. That was a few months ago. After viewing your site and then some links to random other places (stopdesign.com, divintomark.org, and so on), I was inspired to refresh my knowledge of design.
And now I am working on something for my youth group. We are using Movable Type, among other things.
Thanks
Sean–glad to hear our site has been helpful to you.
I’d love to hear how you’re using MT for your youth group site sometime (I had kicked around the idea of creating a website for our small group, but never got it off the ground).
We actually get a lot of inbound links on “open source project management.” In some ways, I feel bad that we’re in the top 10 for that search in Google. The entry I’d written by the same title was more about open source software for project management than it was about project management for open source software…or something.
Well I should clarify. We WILL (still in the planing stages) be using MT. I am new to it, and relearning PHP and all that. I have not touched web design in years, unless you count some simple form pages for random databases. The person that was handling it was going to use FrontPage with static pages. But she has been enlightened. Now she is behind me on using xhtml+css and MT/PHP. Whether we will go xhtml strict is still up in the air.
I was actually searching for open source software that could help with project management, so your entry was perfect.
Sean, any help you need with the youth site and MT you just ask me. I’m always up for helping the cause of the Gospel- and I sure do know MT inside and out (thanks muchly to Kenny over here).
K – I agree with sean. You may see it as bland, but your simple but effective design is so difficult for design dweebs (such as myself) to attain. I liked it before. Maybe a comprimise of tabs and simplicity is possible? and I still miss my separator line
re: “But she has been enlightened.”
Ha!
Glad to hear! I would think, too, that accessibility would be a great sell for XHTML 1.0 + CSS. Not that XHTML necessarily brings accessibility to the table per se (you could just as easily use HTML 4.1 and be accessible), but the discipline of seperating structure and presentation goes a long way towards the process–something that is truly impossible with Microsoft Frontpage.
re: “Maybe a comprimise of tabs and simplicity is possible?”
Well, the tabs were a bit of a compromise. My biggest complaint about the previous design (aside from the fact that it didn’t use any cutting edge CSS tricks anyway) was that there was really no clear indication where I (as a user) was in the website. This, incidentally, was why I introduced the breadcrumb trail.
While the b/c trail was helpful, I don’t think it answered to the usability problem as much as I would have liked. I’m already using body id attributes to denote which “section” of the site a user was in–I figured, “why not take advantage of them?”
If you check out the CSS, the implementation is kind of neat. When you’re on the About page (or any of its derivatives), the CSS elements “line up” in such a way that the About link is highlighted. Ditto for all the other sections. Plus, you can tell where you are in the site by just glancing at the navigation bar.
re: “and I still miss my separator line”
Better now?