Lead Thoughts

Site Information

Nov 2007: Style switching is turned off for the moment while I address some issues. It can still be switched on a per page basis if your browser supports it internally.

Style Switching

Style switching is inspired largely by css Zen Garden and David Shea's presentations at Web Essentials 2004, seeing how it's easy to nice designs with CSS layouts when web standards are followed.

The intent of redesigning this site to adhere to web standards was mainly to simply to have a better webpage, and make life easier the next time I want to redesign it. I didn't set out to have a style switcher. The different styles came about just from testing different styles, to determine how well I'd laid out the code.

Previously on other websites I've written a server side style switcher. For this website I use Paul Sowden's client side javascript style switcher. Read the Alternative Style: Working With Alternate Style Sheets at A List Apart.

Styles

Desert

Latest site redesign theme - November 2007

Windows Classic

Windows Classic, suprise suprise, is based on the Microsoft Windows classic desktop look and feel.

From memory it's based on Windows 2000, though it may actual be based on Windows XP's classic theme.

Windows XP

Windows XP is an attempt at the default Windows XP theme. It's very incomplete.

Weblog

Weblog is supposed to take the (over used) weblog type layout to the site. It's just something I'm playing with, and is very incomplete.

Standard

Standard is the style my page had up until August 2004, before changing to a CSS based design. The main difference is that the sidebar was a frame.

Having not done CSS Layout style switching before, and rebuilding this site with the Windows Classic style, it was impressive to see how experience first hand how easy it was with CSS to replicate the look of my current website visual design.

1996

Style wise, this is how my site looked in 1996, when it was created. More or less. The content has certainly changed over the last 8 years, but in terms of colors, font's and backgrounds...

Until 1998, the site was frameless, and used [Site Information] style navigation towards the bottom of every page, which can't be represented with CSS. Actually, it'd be cool to try pull the left navigation bar down and attempt to reproduce it with CSS. In 1998, there was only about 4 navigation links. Borders were also different than represented here, there we're oh so nice default horizontal rules instead.

And oh, the lovely background that screams mid 90's website! It's actually suprising the number of positive comments I received regarding this background at the time. I must say, it was definately the best of all of them out there. Which is no doubt why it lasted on my page for too long (circa 2002).