Pages within the news section:
- Main News Page: The main news section of the website;
- The Wayfarer: News on Stuart Vallantine himself.
- Website Development News: News on www.stuartvallantine.co.uk.
- News Archive: Past stories.
The Future's... the Mobile Stuart Vallantine Web Experience
Tuesday 11th September 2007
Gr8 news 4 mobile web browsers :)
This summer's wet weather may have been a cause for complaint for UK sun seekers, braving the floods and torrential rain. However, in spite of this pain, I had been coding again.
The SV Web Experience has been optimised further to accommodate persons viewing the site on PDAs, Blackberry devices and mobile phones. At present, CSS code has been tweaked to accommodate this, so as to allow for the reduced screen display. Future revisions may involve the possible pagination of longer articles.
Hopefully, the (mobile friendly) SVWE should look well on 'Blazer' (bundled with Palm PDAs) as well as Firefox, IE7, Opera, et al.
New Look Picture Gallery
Saturday 7th July 2007
New unified look to the drawings section
Following on the main pages, one of the lesser, though important sections of the website has been revamped.
In line with the main sections of the SVWE, the GMT inspired colour schemes is evident. Navigation within this section has been improved on. This too uses CSS for positioning, and XHTML markup.
As part of the refurbishment scheme, the CSS code is incorporated within the main stylesheet. Previously, the gallery sections had their own stylesheet. Image files have also been compressed to allow for faster loading times.
Any comments on this part of the revamp are welcome.
Look Ma, No Table Cells
Sunday 10th June 2007
The new look Stuart Vallantine Web Experience
After nearly eighteen months of being in cyberspace, this website has had its first real makeover.
In the last six weeks, the main sections of the Stuart Vallantine Web Experience has been revamped and changed beyond slight recognition
Out are the table cells. The whole thing is done using <DIV> tags and CSS style sheets for positioning. The result is a more contemporary look, though with some continuity to avoid regular visitors. Happily, for regular visitors, the Greater Manchester Transport style colour scheme is integral to the site. For the transport geeks, the design is inspired by GMT's 1974 - 1980 colour scheme.
Most of the site is now coded using XHTML markup and has fewer accessibility issues than its predecessor.
This site has also been tested on Opera, K-Meleon and IE6 as well as Mozilla Firefox, my usual browser. Compared with the previous incarnation, no proprietary software was used, apart from images seen on the previous version. All new graphics were produced with the GIMP. Coding was done using a freeware text editor, and Nvu, an open source equivalent to Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage.
Feel free to comment. If you think I've made a mistake akin to Coca Cola's new formula in 1985, or a technical revolution, please tell me.
One Year On
Saturday 27th January 2007
The first twelve months in the life of the Stuart Vallantine Web Experience
Was it really a year since this website was uploaded? Yes.
The 26th January 2006 saw the launch of this worthy venture, designed to showcase the artistic and written work of The Travelling Poet, a.k.a Stuart Vallantine.
In fact, plans for a website had been in place since 2001, which at the time I regarded as an irrelevance. I was under the idea that I would be one of several insignificant billion upon billion websites, unvisited and (worse), designed using proprietary software and design templates.
By 2003, I joined a search engine consultancy, which has seen me gain knowledge in HTML, CSS and (whilst trying to remain sane) that necessary evil of content management systems. The year after, I experimented with a WYSIWYG web editor, which led to the current Stuart Vallantine Web Experience which you see today.
One year after, the current site has gained an average of 42 visitors a day. It has spawned a Blog, entitled 'East of the M60' and has had favourable reviews. Recent comments have been made about the site heuristics (in layperson's terms, site navigation) and the Greater Manchester Transport style colour scheme.
The future Stuart Vallantine Web Experience will maintain a link with the Greater Manchester Transport influenced colour scheme. This will aid and establish familiarity with persons browsing the website (as proof of this, eBay, Google and Amazon have had virtually unchanged schemes from the start). Future developments will see a transition towards tableless formatting with greater use of CSS commands and <DIV> tags, plus fluid positioning. Though still designed for 800x600 resolution, the site will be more visually attractive to persons browsing on 1280x1024 and above resolutions.
Here's to another year, then... CHEERS!
Strictly Speaking
Sunday 12th November 2006
A Transition from one Doctype to another
The Stuart Vallantine Web Experience has been converted from the Transitional to the Strict version of the HTML 4.01 Doctype.
The advantages of using the Strict Doctype are improved CSS and browser compatibility. Most pages have also been converted from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 Unicode encoding for similar reasons.
