New Design on Help Developer

This morning I got up and decided that I would redesign Help Developer in one day, and I have done just that, from about 12PM till now (3:40 in the morning), I have designed and coded the brand new template that you see before you. I wanted to make the site more warm and homely hence the use of the colour brown.

The new design has a number of new features which I will highlight below:

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jQuery Integration

I have been learning jQuery for the past couple of weeks and really wanted to show it off on this theme. I have applied it to the drop down menu, the search box and the sidebar, now if you want to hide the sidebar you can by simply clicking the Hide Sidebar link.

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SIFR

SIFR is a technique whereby you use a mix of Javascript and Flash to create text using fonts that the user doesn’t have installed on their computer which means that you can use a whole host of great fonts to enhance the design of the site. I have implemented SIFR in the Sidebar widgets.

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Quick Tips

Quick Tips is a sidebar widget that will offer quick tips in design and coding, anyone can add a tip and the title of each tip links to the website of the author of the tip so it is a great way to get some more exposure.

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Community

Community Links were on the old design but on the new one they have become a focal part, as with quick tips anyone can add relevant resources and get more exposure to their site. This is a technique adopted on many design sites now and is a great way to get more readers.

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Separated Comments and Trackbacks

A big problem with the old design is that I’d tend to get more trackbacks than comments so it would be hard to keep up with what people were saying and near impossible to have comment conversations. In the new design I have used jQuery to separate the comments from the trackbacks so that the trackbacks are only shown when you want them to be shown.

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inspireCSS Gallery

I launched a CSS Gallery a while back which was designed to be part of Help Developer, however in the previous design all I had was a link, in the new design you can now see the latest 10 submissions from the drop down menu or at the bottom of any page on the site.

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Twitter

I now use Twitter and will continue to use it and post my finds and comments on there so you can follow me if you want, I have made it more readily available in the sidebar now so you can keep up to date.

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I hope that you like the new design and welcome your comments. Also if there is anything on the new design that you would like me to write a tutorial on then let me know and I’ll add it to my post schedule.