How Deep Is The Ocean?
The online portfolio & blog of Eric Ogburn

It’s been a few years since I first launched pixelfork.com, and a lot has changed in that time. First, my daughter was born; second, Hurricane Katrina made a mess of things, and third, I’ve moved to Austin as my wife finishes graduate school. However, the biggest thing that has changed since pixelfork’s inception is that my client base has grown, and most of them aren’t restaurants. Pixelfork started out with the mantra “web design for the restuarant industry,” but as my client base has changed, the direction of pixelfork has changed with it.

So I thought it was time to redesign the site to reflect the evolving entity that is pixelfork.com. First, while I still mention restaurants, the site no longer focuses exclusively on that market. Instead it now has a more general approach. I also mention theme-design for Wordpress blogs, though soon I will be adding Expression Engine as a content management and blogging platform that I can handle.

As for the design itself, the biggest departure is that the entire site is now only one page, though I offer two ways of viewing it, vertically and horizontally. My portfolio is viewable using the Slimbox plugin for Mootools, creating a large, navigable screenshots for each site.

In pixelfork.com’s last version, I had included a blog, which I have now removed. Honestly, it was just too much to try to blog on two different sites. I decided in lieu of the blog, to simply have a “Latest Project” area at the top of the site to feature, well, my latest project.

That’s it in a nutshell. There are a few bells and whistles added that I didn’t mention here, and I may soon add a downloadable Wordpress template section. And of course, in the middle of any design or redesign, you’re automatically thinking about the next design, so who knows, in another year or so I may switch it up again.

Pixelfork.com has just completed the website Tulane Golf Classic. The Ray Hester Chapter of the Tulane Athletic Fund hired me to build a site that would help them attract sponsors to their annual golf tournament. In addition, they needed registration and prize information for prospective registrants. Content for the site needed to be editable, so I set up a simple PHP system to facilitate new content.

XHTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript

As some of you may know, but most don’t because I have no readers (I can admit it), the site has been down as I’ve been putting the finishing touches on the redesign. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it was necessary to hammer out all of the bugs.

Before I list all of the changes to the site, I’d like to tell you why I redesigned it in the first place. First, if this is not your first time here, you may notice that the site looks very similar to its previous version. That’s intentional. I’ve always like the original design. What I did not like was that it lacked the fluidity that it represented, in both layout and in implementaion. The new design is much easier for me to update, which should hopefully help me to update the content more often. But more importantly, the new design takes advantage of fluid layout.

NOTE: The site is not fluid for Internet Explorer users. Why? Because Microsoft’s ancient browser doesn’t support the same web standards other browsers support. The new Internet Explorer 7, due out any day now, fixes many problems, and will give you the same experience as the rest of us. If you must continue using Internet Explorer, make sure to update IE7 when it launches (you can actually download the beta version now). Otherwise, I highly highly highly recommend Firefox. You’ll thank me later. Moving on…

Give it a test. Make your browser smaller or larger. Neat, huh? What’s best is that all of the high res photos will scale with the size of the browser. This benefits those with lower resolution monitors, since the site will work just fine for you, and the pictures will be plenty big. But those of you with higher resolution monitors can really have fun, as the site will grow to fit your screen.

The other problem I’ve tried to correct has its roots in the site’s birth. The original site launched while I was evacuated from New Orleans during Katrina. What was supposed to be a window into my personality, which is far from being very serious, turned a little too staid. So I’ve added a few items that I hope will help express what I’m about.

Another thing I’ve changed is the distance between this site and pixelfork.com, my freelance web design business. Pixelfork had its birth after my return to New Orleans, and I rarely mentioned it here, thinking it best to keep the two separated. But I think since they live on the same laptop, they can at least recognize each other on the web.

Lastly, I have (hopefully) simplified the site’s navigation, and made the Photograph’s page more pleasant to use. If you have any problems or notice any issues with the new design drop me a line, or leave a comment.

My web design business pixelfork.com just finished the website for local ice cream parlor, the Creole Creamery. I was asked to build it based on the color scheme of the store, which was made up of lots of pink and red with a checkerboard floor. It’s certainly not your everyday color palette, and not one I’m very familiar with, but it was nice to mix it up. Visit the site here.

Well, I’m proud to announce that my submission CSS Celestial Garden has been accepted and I’m now listed at Dave Shea’s CSS Zen Garden.

For those of you not acquainted with the Garden, it is a website that helped inspire many web designers to move from traditional table-based layouts to web standards-based layouts using CSS (cascading style sheets). In the past, websites were designed on one page. The content was styled with tags like “font,” “table” and “bold.” When it was time to redesign the site, it made the task a monumental undertaking, because each element on the page would have to be found and recoded.

Enter CSS. The idea behind CSS is to separate style from content. You can have one static HTML page, and style it from another an external file. The beauty and power behind separating the style from the content is exemplified in the CSS Zen Garden. The Zen Garden is made of one HTML file.

The author, Dave Shea, invited other web designers to design a one page site based on the HTML page and submit their design’s CSS file and its images. As of this writing there have been 941 accepted submissions since 2003, of which I am now one.

NYTimes.com went live with its new redesign Sunday. It’s a fantastic redesign and a testament to what coding with web standards and CSS can accomplish. I particluarly like the “below the fold” section that lists the major articles for all of the sections of paper. The previous design was solid, one of the few newspaper websites that actually look like a newspaper. And while there is more content on each page of the new design, it is easier to read, and easier to navigate. Did I mention that it’s fast? It’s very fast.

The print stylesheet is a little dull. No photos from the article are included on the print page, but I suspect that it will get a treatment before too long.

Look for other newspapers to follow suit, both in design and coding with standards.

An interesting article on font selection… The Secret Lives of Fonts

I’ve just finished testing the site on Internet Explorer 6 for Windows and noticed that sometimes a photo album or picture from the photos page will show up as “Page Not Found.” If this is happening, try refreshing the page a time or two. It seems to catch after a few tries.

I’m not sure why this is happening, and I’m efforting a solution. Just chalk it up as one more reason to use a better browser than Internet Explorer. When Internet Explorer 7 debuts (five years after the last release) a lot of these problems should go away, but I won’t get my hopes up.

Use a better browser! Download Firefox!

Technically, I’m no longer freelance, as my web design work now falls under the pixelfork umbrella. I’m very excited about the launch of the site and the business. My hope is to offer great service and great design to the industry that I love, the service industry. Of course, I continue to offer web design and blog design for parties not affiliated with restaurants.