Who You Calling A Jesse?

The Beta site has gone live over the weekend so now you likely have already seen the changes. Obvious layout changes are the search in the top, no drop down menus, and a more detailed footer which are all inline with the CLF. Some other layout changes include page centering, strong headlines, and a little background colouring on paragraphs.

CSS Changes

First off, you may notice that I refer to different CSS. Why? Well I made a few minor adjustments for centering (left nav over a bit, bigger, and lower) and I wasn’t sure if that should just be custom or an actual change to the ‘UWblank.css.’ I think offering up some v2p0 will give you chance to test your pages. But there are some other things I needed to fix:

bugs from bug fixes

Wow is this an annoying bug. There are a few workarounds, but what I have done is add this line:

* html ul li a {height:1em;}

This should take care of the problem for future ul’s used for navigation but it opens up a new one. The fix is posted on the forum.

Page centre/er

This one is causing some discussion in places. What I did was insert a ‘pagecontainer’ div at the top of the document that encases the entire site. Then in the custom.css file i added:

#pagecontainer {
position:absolute;
width: 760px;
height:inherit;
right:50%;
margin:0 -380px 0 0;
}

This has the effect of centering the web page without much fuss. Neato. It does have some drawbacks though. Seems if you go at 640×480 resolution, the page gets cut off to the left. Now if you are using 640×480, I wonder how usable the internet or any applications are for you ;) but that shouldn’t matter. That needs to be fixed and it is on the list of fixes for final version in the fall.

One thing, if you are going with centering please know it is a pretty rough implementation.

Back to the content

Loads of people have noticed that the right navigation appears to be floating with text wrapped. Well that isn’t right navigation. Those links are as much part of the relevant content of the page as anything else. It does not appear anywhere else either, just that page. That is why it is different.

How about the home page right nav? Well that is a fluid column that will change regularly. It is the ‘flavour of the month’ club. So if you have something you want in there, let me know. We are going to changing out links as they come.

The rest of the content is a mix of what was there before and the ‘We’re Waterloo’ annual report that goes out yearly. The content based on the report will be updated when the report is.

On to beta 2?

Over the summer we will be doing some usability testing, some development, and listening to other feedback received. We expect to be done fiddling with the home page in the fall – then the cycle starts again ;)

I will be posting here thoughts, ideas, beta URL’s to new features, and links over the summer. So stay tuned. Keep those kind words and entertaining feedback submissions coming… I could right a book.