Love you Niq! Without you guys I may have never had the guts to go freelance! And without that I wouldn’t have the amazing travelling life I have now. Thanks for being the most wonderful client I could ever dream of and for making me feel like part of the family. Here’s to many more years of increased sales and shiny new website happiness!

I’ve manually added in all the comments from the last week to make it a bit easier. If you would like to trawl through the old site begin here. It won’t be up forever though.

So what’s changed?
Well you might notice the domain is now www.yummy-wakame.com. This is because I bought this domain and a fantastic new PHP hosting server option to develop the new site on while the old site remained undisturbed. All old page links will eventually point to this new domain.

You’ll notice the site is now a LOT bigger. I desperately needed a proper portfolio site since going freelance, so that’s tucked away in there too.

The old site wasn’t standards compliant at all. It had scruffy code which I wasn’t too happy with, since I was only just learning CSS when I built it. The new Yummy Wakame validates as XTML strict, so it should render properly on all browsers that support web standards. It is AAA accessible, which means that people with disabilities and with special browsers can access the information without any problems. It is also accessible from handheld devices that can get online. And of course its all done with pure CSS. No tables or old-style HTML. Nice and clean! A lot of web designers sigh and complain that its impossible to design anything pretty under the restrictions of CSS and AAA accessible requirements, but hopefully this is an example of what can be achieved if you put your mind to it.

What’s left to do?
A special stylesheet for hand-held devices is coming soon.

And the archive, well it doesnt work so well at the moment since all the old blogger posts had no titles… so over time I will have to go in and manually edit every single post and give them titles. This will take me a long time to complete since there are a few thousand posts to fix.

I also need to send invites out to all my editors!

Oh and you might come across some pages I forgot to complete. Let me know if you do. Well, enjoy! I had fun making it.

Generating Dynamic CSS with PHP
One of the things I’ve done with the new yummy wakame (I know I know, it will be launched eventually!) is used PHP in my main stylesheet. This is because each section has identical styles, but a different colourscheme. So at the top of each page (in a section server side include) I declare new values for the colour variables that page will use, and the stylesheet looks for these values when it’s loaded, filling in the colours where Ive put placeholders. This way I can avoid creating separate stylesheets for each section, keeping the site size down to a minimum, and eliminating the need to make changes across a whole bunch of stylesheets every time I make a small change.

Anyway, I found this article today which explains how it’s done. I wish I’d found it before when I originally got the idea months back. This one does it in a different way though… but it works just as well.