I spent some time this afternoon completing the first pass at a consistent re-formatting, via style sheets, of the various pages of the site. Most of this should be transparent to the user; the reasons for doing it include ease of maintaining the site, and a necessary enforcement of more consistent layout, via template pages. I mention it here just in case anyone notices any problems… which you shouldn’t, unless you’re using an antiquated browser (and can’t be bothered downloading for free the latest), which might not interpret the css style tags correctly.
So far I’ve reformatted each of the latest Monitor pages — that would be New Books, New Magazines, New in Paperback, Classic Reprints, and Bestsellers — as well as the Directories pages [and their 2004 equivalents] — and the standing Future History pages, where I’ve also implemented a tweak to the color scheme (since, I decided, the old scheme was too close to the Monitor page scheme): Author Events, Conventions, and Forthcoming Books. I’m abandoning the on-again off-again Announcements page, and will post such items amidst the Conventions items, in a distinctive font color. One of the changes for consistency is that all pages will now be 750 pixels wide (or a bit wider, in the case of the Bestsellers page, which has for some time now been 800 pixels wide).
I tackled the most difficult pages first — those that involve various special formatting, for lists, bibliographic information, and whatnot — and so expect to complete similar reformatting of all the other current pages of the site (news, features, Locus magazine issue pages, and the various ‘about’ the website and the magazines pages) relatively quickly… within the next week… Though again, you shouldn’t notice any difference; the changes will be at the level of html coding. OTOH, I also will be updating the actual text of the FAQ page, the about the website, about the magazine, pages, and so on. A general upgrade. I’ll mention it here again when it’s all done.
