Game Anim – Blog of A Videogame Animator

  • HTML and CSS is something of a hobby for me, and Game Anim is my personal blog that’s been evolving over the years. With each iteration I tend to strip more and more away from the design and a recent update has left it looking cleaner than ever before.

    I’d be interested in any feedback, though am most interested in order of priority in:

    Cross-browser display. This is an area that I struggle with as I do most of my development in FireFox and check IE periodically. How do developers check their sites in every available browser routinely without slowing production too much?

    Accessibility. I’m hopeful that interested readers can easily access relevant earlier posts once they disappear from the front page.

    Low Resolution Screen Support. A not-too-insignificant percentage of visitors still appear to be using screens of 1024 width. How much effort is it worth supporting this and are there suggestions to best cover this.

    Thankyou very much for any feedback,

    Jonathan

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  • Hey there! Thanks for sharing your WordPress with us. ??

    A couple of things since you brought them up:

    RE: Cross browser display

    Checking with different browsers takes me less than a minute to do per check.

    One minute for Firefox, one minute for IE, one minute for Safari, one minute for Opera, one minute for Chrome, one minute for Flock.

    That’s less than 10 minutes to check to make sure everything displays as it should.

    To me, that’s hardly a dent in my development time. If ten minutes bothers you, then call it Q and A testing. Your viewers/visitors will love you for it and hate you if you skip it. ??

    If you’re talking about CODING to ensure cross browser compatibility, there’s not much you can do to ‘hasten things along’ aside from practicing your CSS and HTML skills and ingraining into your mind the various bugs and quirks and bug triggers for the major browsers.

    For myself, experience after experience has taught me what situations trigger what sorts of bugs for IE6 for example and so nowadays, I can code a full layout WITH flexible dimensions, WITH floats, WITH all kinds of crazy positioning and not trigger any of IE6’s famous and some not so well known bugs.

    So if you’re asking about coding itself – practice makes perfect. Good habits will keep you from making most major mistakes and understanding the whys and wherefores of bug triggers will save you the rest of the hairpulling. ??

    RE: Accessibility

    Yes, once I scroll down, I see the breadcrumb trail that suggests to me there are definitely more posts to see.

    I would perhaps increase the font size for that and give it more visibility, especially with how wide the layout is.

    RE: Low Resolution Screen Support

    You’re just in luck! ?? I will be your low resolution viewer for the day as I use a tablet PC that does not have anything higher than a 1024 resolution.

    Don’t move away from 1024 yet; you think the percentage is small, but it isn’t! 36% of the marketshare is NOT in any way, shape, or form small and I happen to be one of them. ??

    Your background image is clearly meant to fit a bigger screen resolution so I am guessing your layout is fixed width. A good way to work around the situation of browser sizes is to code for a flexible layout. My own website can be easily read from the smallest 800 x 600 screen to the largest Apple screen without looking much (if at all) different.

    Randomly, this issue has to do with accessibility and usability, too. Being able to access a website and view it and not have the site look all jumbled due to sizing issues is definitely about accessibility.

    In the case of your website, your background image is of one size, but your layout is of another and the two look disjointed, which interferes with the reading of content in the sidebars.

    RE: OVERALL

    I really like and can appreciate the minimalistic and clean look. Very sleek. Efficient. Right at your fingertips. My sorta style and to be honest, I am pleased to see that not everyone goes for the rounded corners and bajillion-things-going-on look. ??

    If your background image and layout weren’t disjointed in my 1024 viewing window, I would definitely like your site a lot more!

    Thread Starter alsoran

    (@alsoran)

    Thanks EMG for the lengthy reply.

    In regards to your cross-browser suggestions, I guess I just need to do more extensive testing in all the browsers but less often. I typically check in often IE & Firefox when doing rapid iteration on element placement as that’s where most of the discrepancies occur.

    Regarding making the breadcrumbs more visible – I’ll take on the suggestion, but will likely favour a colour/background change to draw attention rather than font-size to maintain consistency.

    Lastly, I guess I shouldn’t underestimate the low-res requirement if the share is as big as you suggest – (I hadn’t considered the popularity of netbooks etc.) I believe I’ve fixed the background issue, and I’ll begin on ideas as to how to shave off some more width to make the entire layout fit without scrolling – just for you ??

    Thanks again for your comments and kind words,

    J

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