I’d like to continue the posts from last week - we left off at me asking what’s going to happen to PIM after the tutorials have moved to the SOP site. But to be honest, my epiphanies stopped there. That and I am incredibly sick. I’ve been having a rather bad cough for a few months now, but last week it got to the point were I tasted blood. (Thank goodness, no coughing up of blood!) So I headed to the doctor and have spent the last few days not really wanting to do much of anything.

Follow up:

Lucky I have a laptop. Don’t have to move out of bed to get anything done and don’t have to cough up a lung whilst doing it (oh, but those germs have tried!).

So I, glutton for punishment, got out the draft design for SOP and started working on creating the template for it. I’m still waiting on final images, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to get a head start on things. That and I kind of reworked some of the images myself, though they’re in no way as good as they’re supposed to be.

And I’m very very happy with what I’ve made. Things are much more streamlined, with a different way to navigate - drop-down menus will list the categories, possibly with some retraction of the number of categories - a much simpler look, and an actual colour selection which I’m going to follow to the letter.

Despite it being nowhere near ready to reveal to the public yet, I can at least let you preview the design. I hope you like it! 

Now, it’s important to note that the SOP main page will keep you away from the preview page, so the preview’s only visible if you know which url to go to: http://www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au/about.php.

The actual draft that I got sent didn’t include the search function or icons, but I knew they had to be added in, and just stuck them were I could. I quite like the way it ended up: plus, I made a nifty little icon using my PIM logo to link back to this site.

If you hover your mouse over the ‘About’ menu link, you’ll see the drop-down menu. Unfortunately, I’m still getting the bugs out for IE users, but it looks fab in Firefox. (Although it may look weird in other browsers, I haven’t checked them, so if it’s wonky for you, please let me know) And I’m really happy with this idea as a way to get rid of the horrendously large categories list that’s on the Learn Online page. I wavered over whether or not it would be unobvious that there are drop-down menus (like, if you’re on a single post page and want to find other posts), but I think it will work. The posts on the ‘Tutorials’ page for example, will be listed in bunches of five or so, instead of one post per page, so it will also be easier to figure out. … I hope 

Anyway, you can also see the content quite easily, with less stuff in the way to distract you from reading it; and the right-hand side will have ads as per my previous post on the upcoming changes.

By the way, don’t just see the top half of the site; scroll down. The design continues on… And yeah, the content is still in ‘draft’ mode, but it’s easier to create a template when you actually have content to work with.

Amazing that in two days I can practically do 70% of the design done using b2evolution, and yet the UNIMA Australia site took me an entire year with Joomla. Can you guess which one I’ll avoid from now on?

Well, now that you’ve seen a preview, what do you think?

I’m going to go back to bed now, and revel in the coughyness. Tomorrow I begin work again on the UNIMA site, since Tues is the soft launch and I have to (sigh) do a security upgrade before releasing it.