Website design

When creating the site I've used the open design TerraFirma1.0 by NodeThirtyThree, but some modification was made. In my opinion, it improves appearance and functionality. There is a list of changes:

  • Width of internal area was increased from 687 to 870 pixels. This implies horizontal scrolling for such low resolutions as 800x600 which could be hardly found today. Now the minimal resolution should be 1024x768. Thus, we leave more space for content. The original design is static, so this modification affects sizes of different elements. For example, the space for a name of the site was increased.
  • Font size was increased. This helps the site to look better on modern monitors with tiny pixels and also helps visitors not to ruin their eyesight. Furthermore it reduces number of symbols in the line and improves readability.
  • Main background image was changed. Lines are separated by a greater distance now and that is better for higher font size, I think.
  • The way of shadow displaying was changed. The original design has breaks of the background lines in the place where shadow ends, depending on a page width. To avoid this artefact we use transparency here. Unfortunately, it's not fully supported by some old browsers such as Internet Explorer 6.0 and below. They render a shadow line differently but this doesn't break the general view. It was decided not to add any hacks to support transparency in IE.
  • Created sticky footer. The technology of Ryan Fait was used.
  • The height of bottom part of a short post (where comment link is placed) was decreased. This helps to reduce unused space.
  • Icons for language switching were added.

The final design wasn't published as a complete template, but you can use it for personal reasons conforming to Creative Commons license, if you link back to this page. Feel free to contact me, if you have notes and suggestions concerning with this design.

Nikita Melnichenko.