elegant simplicity

As you will have noticed, the website has a new theme! It is a very bright, modern thing with one foot in the past and one foot in the future. It is semi-compliant in the sense that all of it is valid CSS/XHTML except the main data displaying tables; which is still the best way to display tabular data.

Actually, a week or so ago, I managed to get a fully compliant site working on DNN . . . it looked great but I could not get the two columns to behave consistently enough to warrant using it on a live site. Still, I will keep plugging away at it!

In other web-buildery type news, I have just launced a new site at toeinwater.co.uk, dedicated to my after hours creations. Please stop by and take a look - I bult it on a heavily customised BlogEngine.net package.

On a previous version of this website, there was a page devoted to recording all the radio broadcasts featuring our music. Unfortunately that, and a few other pages, never seemed to get finished. Well, after some hard work and patience, I am pleased to report that the radio log is now back, fully up to date and can be found right here.

It's still not complete, in turns of how it looks, but just getting the data grid and the master/detail thing working means that the cosmetic touches can now be applied at any time. The important thing is that it is working, fully functional and rather groovy!

After a very long time thinking about getting round to it, I finally fixed some of the long-standing issues with the CSS used in the Forum. The main issue was the ill-proportioned text sizes that plagued the main forum page as well as some of the links etc. The new fixes brings the colour scheme into line with the main site and makes it a tad more pleasing on the eye.

After some time tweaking and building, I am very proud to announce that proximityrecords.co.uk has been re-launched as a fully scale-able e-commerce solution. It contains the full range of Elegant Simplicity albums, downloads, merchandise etc in a beautiful and contemporary looking site.

So, why is this different from the site you are viewing now?

Well, with the new site, customers can buy a bundle, for example, and choose there and then which albums they want instead of having to wait for me to request the information first. In addition, because it can now handle downloads (not activated yet) it means I can add more to the site without incurring extra costs.

Also, it can be set up to handle discounts, promotion vouchers, mailing list notifications, shopping basket customising etc - all the things that this site cannot do - elegantsimplicity.com was designed to be a simple ...

Earlier today, I decided that the site needed a more modern look (did someone shout web 2.0?) so I spent a few hours designing a new masthead and re-vamping the CSS. The result is what you are looking at now, just uploaded. I call it Elegant002.

I think it looks pretty cool! What do you think?

For the curious, I created the graphics in Photoshop CS2, and used my universal 3 column template creation as the backbone for the ASCX file, which was edited in MS Visual Studio 2005. This is a great piece of software! The CSS was also tweaked in Visual Studio, with Firebug (a  rather nifty Firefox plug-in) helping me track down any errors.

A good few hours work, for sure, but I think the new look should serve the site well a for the next few months of supporting the new CD (when it eventually gets here!).

One of the pitfalls of running a few websites is the constant worry that they are always going to be available. I mean, a visitor may happen along to purchase a cd or something and the sale is gone due to the site not appearing. Well, this happened yesterday. I lost both this site and the Proximity Records website. Both homepages reported varying degrees of database errors. Given that  there had been no work on the databases from me for some time, I could only conclude that the fault was at the host end. Which is in the USA. Which meant that the delay between reporting it and getting a reply was around 8 hours.

In any event, it got sorted, though I have yet to recieve an explanation for the downtime, which, I might add, is very rare: my US based hosts are prettty much fantastic.

Still, we're back and that's the main thing!