As promised in my earliest posts, I’ve been improving the Enter Venture blog in increments starting with a basic, clean slate with few widgets or distractions. I spent a good part of today working on Enter Venture so it’s worth noting the changes to both inform my readers and to justify the hour I spent trying to fix the spacing between the search element and the RSS feed link in the header.

So, what’s new? Well, everything about Enter Venture has changed. Has it? It looks mostly the same as before. Some of you may have noticed my apology to IE users that used to be in the sidebar. I originally built the Enter Venture theme using a blank WordPress framework I found online.

This was the ideal way to get started with Enter Venture because I simply had to add the elements and styles that I wanted. There was no baggage to deal with. A true blank slate.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. It’s not possible to work with someone else’s code without dealing with their baggage. There was a severe crack in my blank slate, and the more I tinkered with this framework, the worse the cracks became. I had trouble getting the design to work remotely similar in IE versus FireFox. I had markup validation problems galore. Everything I did seemed like a hack.

This morning, I ditched the blank slate and decided to re-build Enter Venture using the Default Theme that comes with WordPress. Since I already knew what I wanted Enter Venture to look like, it was drastically simpler for me to work with an existing theme this time around. Also, since I’d already built the Enter Venture theme once, I could remove the Default elements and rebuild with the design and code from the previous Enter Venture template. While flawed, that original blank slate design made this exercise much, much simpler.

Now, the sidebar actually shows up in IE! The header’s bottom border shows up in IE!

Even better, working from this more robust framework gave me several improvements for free. Enter Venture now supports comments. Also, since I’m using the framework for the original Default template, I was able to build my Links list simply from the WordPress admin menu. I also moved the Twitter script to its proper location so it will not prevent the page from loading if (when) Twitter is having response issues.

There will be more improvements to come, but I’d like to focus on content for awhile. For now, “Look ma, no hacks!”

Posted in Blogging, Website Design