Web Design, SEO & CSS… etc

I was approached by British Dressage rider Lara Dyson to design her own website after working closely with her on the Cyden Homes website for her family company. Aside from riding, Lara has set up Cyden Dressage based in Lincolnshire to train horses and other riders.

I’ve recently been taking a lot of notice of the beauty of partial transparency now available to good browsers primarily the RGBa css unfortunately not supported by the bag of crap Internet Explorer. I ended up having to find a very functional workaround for IE involving an rgba.php script that generates a partial transparent .png file which is then tiled as an old fashioned background.

Firefox, Chrome, safari all beautifully render partial transparency just that sack of shit IE that continues to be the bane of an easy design life.

As I was coming up with the initial layout photoshop mockup for Lara to approve Google released their IMO seriously cool fonts directory. I was keen to use a different font having spent ten years stuck pretty much with Arial, ,Verdana, Times and Georgia.

I have also shifted away from Windows in favour of Ubuntu and so far I have to say, I love it! fast, clean and just better. So aside from the design headaches I was also having to get used to new software primarily Bluefish, Gedit and the Gimp for graphics/photo work. My old FTP client Filezilla was available for Ubuntu so there are some familiar things around. I also extended my desktop with an additional monitor so now have a 24″ and my older 19″ running alongside each other. Productivity is certainly speeded up and dragging a window across from one monitor to the other also looks pretty cool.

So, back to the site design. Lara was very happy with the initial layout and all the over lapping transparencies bring a real depth and 3 dimensional effect. The text blocks etc all go darker when hovered, highlighting the text more clearly too and I have used a lot of jQuery. It’s a bit slower in IE as the rgba.php script has to generate the images and then the css tiles each elements background but as far as I’m concerned IE is for people who aren’t really all that bothered about their internet experience. With Firefox and Chrome easily available there is no real reason to continue to use Microsoft’s awful browser. I just don’t understand why they Microsoft seem to steer clear of supporting great CSS.