2003 Redesign

The redesign of Planet Bods, launched on 20 July 2003, sees a number of improvements to the site.

Leaner and Meaner

First big change is that the site is now quicker to download thus meaning you spend less time waiting and more time reading. If you wish anyway!

Cleaner Design

The design has been simplified. The old tab navigation which appeared at the top of the screen has been moved to beneath the banner, and no longer looks like tabs. This navigation continues to give you access to the main sections of the site.

The crumbtrail has also been moved slightly - sitting now above the main content panel.

As before, the section links are displayed on the left of the screen.

More accessible design

For those reading screen readers or viewing the site in an older browser, the content is differently arranged. The main content is displayed first, followed by any associated links or information. The crumbtrail locater is then next, followed by the section navigation. Main navigation is then at the bottom. Hopefully this will make life much easier for those users browsing the site with screen readers or text browsers - if you do, let me know what you think.

A number of new accessibility features have been added, including more title attributes on links, and accesskeys. More will be added over the coming months, and the latest information on accessibility features on the site, is listed on a new Accessibility Statement.

Although Planet Bods is not there yet, it is my aim to make the whole site with all priority 1, 2 and 3 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - very strict standards for web accessibility. This will take some time, but will happen.

Changes to browser support

The new code base behind the site should work best in recent, standards compliant browsers like Mozilla/Netscape 7, Opera and Konqueror. It should also work perfectly on recent versions of Internet Explorer.

Users viewing the site in older browsers like Netscape 4 or Internet Explorer 3 will be presented with the plain text version. Users of Omniweb and iCab may experience some problems with the visual design in places.

No browsers are blocked from viewing this site, however users of Mac Internet Explorer 4.01 or Mac Internet Explorer 4.5 are strongly advised to upgrade to a more recent browser. There are serious flaws with these two browsers, especially in the way they render recent standards compliant sites like this..

Technical Changes

For the techies amongst you, the site is now built using CSS positioning, rather than HTML tables. The code should also be valid HTML 4.01 Transitional. Over coming months, I hope to move to HTML 4.01 Strict, however due to the presence of some very old code in the site, this may take some time.

The site should also use valid CSS.

All code should use structured markup, meaning the content should make sense with or without the graphic design. This includes the use of heading, paragraph and definition list tags, all of which are manipulated in CSS to give the desired design. Although structured markup has been in use for some time, some has been rejigged and enhanced to make more sense.

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