Plain Design Ltd.

That should be the name of my new web development company. There's a lot of complexity in the world and complexity is the true root of all evil.

I've spent most of the weekend updating a website from a ... retro 1998 GeoCities-style to something more humane.

Before After

(Sometime soon, both of those will point to the same one.)

Changes have included:

• Rewriting almost all the old presentation code. It was primarily broken HTML with a table-based layout, and now it's clean HTML+CSS+JavaScript with a position-div-based layout. It's about 1/3. In the end, it's about half the size. The smallest savings come from the PayPal-based order page.
• Restructuring some of the flow. Most of the navigation was usually at the bottom of the page. We now have a sidebar that can get you to almost anywhere, except the individual game's pages, and for those, we have thumbnails of each game leading to their page. Yay.
• Some of the saving comes from how I build the sidebar and header consistently on all pages: they're built using JavaScript and written in response to getHeader() calls on each page.
• Cleaning a lot of the images. Many were GIFs with coloured edges. I cleaned those edges and made them into slightly smaller PNGs. Hurrah!
• We now use Silk icons for a few icons. Yay. Silk is a great CC By-licensed icon set ideal for websites and application development.
• We now use handfont2 by Benji Park as a cool web font as provided by the Open Font Library. There are a few points where text and text images still needs to be converted.

Anyway, there's still some work to be done, but it has been fun. Back to my first comment, though, the new design was initially very plain, and I hope it still mostly is (though the thumbnails son the left and the paw prints up top seem to have muttered up things a bit, in a way I like). I don't have aspirations to particularly rich designs. They often end up garish. A lot of websites I visit look repulsive. Especially on-line stores. I don't understand how making their website difficult to traverse, cluttered, and ugly is supposed to improve sales. Ah well, I'm not everyone. I think my designs err on being too simple sometimes, but at least they are hopefully efficient and a pain-free experience.