About this site's design

Over the last few years, I've changed my coding methods from traditional HTML to a combination of CSS and XHTML. It's made design changes much easier, and it's made this site faster and more efficient. See my Tech Talk for Web Designers page for the (geek talk) details, along with many references, for those of you who want to learn these things for yourself.

I'm a Mac user. If you follow Apple developments, such as the iPhone, you may have noticed that immediately after Steve Jobs' 2007 Keynote Address at the WWDC, (World Wide Developer's Conference) Apple's entire site was replaced with a very nicely-updated version, more in the style of the newest version of OS X, "Leopard" which was released in October of 2007. This wasn't just an "eye candy" update, but rather a modernization of the whole site, on a technical level. Having studied quite a bit of the code, I'm impressed with the elegance of the whole thing. It was like taking a college course in CSS, and helped deepen my understanding of the "inheritance" properties of CSS in particular, and provided some new ideas for using certain imaging techniques on the web. (especially "PNG" images with Alpha Masks)

Giving credit where it's due...

I've been a big fan of Apple's design methods for quite a while, and so after studying the new Apple site for a month or so, I decided to adopt a few of the navigational and layout concepts, to make things faster, easier and better-looking here. I began by cloning their "button-bar" menu interface, but have since changed to a CSS-only drop-down style. (with transparency, of course!) Since Apple is a huge company, and I'm just a one-man show, I wouldn't attempt to directly copy Apple's design, but I've certainly used some of their concepts, because I think they make very good sense. I hope you enjoy the new layout and navigation. It's done here primarily with CSS and XHTML, along with a bit of Javascript, Flash, and DHTML There is not a single HTML table on the whole site, finally.

The current design is a result of my studying the great resources mentioned on my Tech Talk for Web Designers page, and as I noted above, the influence of Apple's new design.

Help me serve you better...

I'm constantly updating this site. So,.. if you don't mind spending a minute or so, typing a brief email to me, feedback would be helpful. If you experience any problems, or are on dialup, and find certain pages loading especially slowly, let me know, and I'll try to improve those. (You won't be added to any "spam" mailing lists, and I don't distribute any email addresses to anyone else, either.)
Thank you!