Assuming you’ve been coming to the website with any frequency over the last few days, you will have noticed various changes. At this point, the site ‘redesign’ is basically over in regards to layout. However, there’s still a little more to do concerning standardizing the look and feel of the site. The overall design is a three column layout.
Our original approach was to have a left column for navigation, main body for the articles and finally a spot for our lovely and gracious sponsors. But, after pushing out that design I noticed that most good sites have the bulk of the content for reading in the left column. It appears our eyes really want to start reading over there. So, we decided to move the main body to the left and the left column into what’s now called the center right column. Like everything that occurs with Drupal, this was fairly simple until the last 10%.
I couldn’t beg, borrow or steal the blog pages to format correctly. Finally, this morning I made the decision to scrap my original design approach which relied on the very clever yet very poorly documented Panels module. Instead, I just moved some of the columns around in the template. This change took a couple of hours but it has been fairly simple and straight forward. The last mile has to do with getting the CSS formatting in place. At this point, 90% of the site looks good with only one place sticking out like a sore thumb. Why is it behaving that way? I don’t know. I will know, but not right now.
