As long time readers will already know Dave likes to change his site pretty much yearly, but this year I shot myself in the foot and suggested an update before Dave even had chance to consider the idea.

To be frank over the year certain areas just started to bug me and the site no longer showcased the company or Dave in the way I thought it should. This coupled with new functionality dropped into the site over the year it seemed time to have a rethink and refocus what the site was delivering.

HTML5

High on the request sheet from Dave was to try and embrace the movement towards HTML5, whilst at Bronco we’ve begun to slip more CSS3 prettiness into our client sites we haven’t made the move to HTML5 so this was going to be a bit of a learning curve.

As much as I’d love to say the site is fully HTML5 it simply isn’t, it’s using the new doctype, tags and attributes but some stuff just isn’t ready yet. Take for example the search input field, it’ll be a nice little function for sites but until you can style it to match your design it’s next to useless.

To my knowledge in order to build a fully HTML5 site you have to pretty much ignore any browser over a year old, but as we do still have some users on IE6 we don’t want to simply send them away without the ability to see what we have to offer. Of course by using some things the site isn’t looking so hot in IE6 but at least everything is both readable and usable.

CSS3

Like I mentioned we’re using some of the new CSS3 stuff to give the site that extra shine too, but this isn’t the only reason to be using this stuff; it also reduces the loading speed of the site. Rather than be using images for rounded corners or gradients we can using CSS to the same effect. This has the benefits of being easier to edit as well as reducing the amount of images that have to be downloaded.

Functionality

We couldn’t do any work on Dave’s site without adding some bits of extra functionality, primarily we’ve integrated the reply to comments feature that WordPress has had for some time. Now people can reply to particular comments so that the conversation flows more naturally. Also we’ve integrated out own shorturl’s into the posts so you can quickly grab a link to a blog post in order to tweet out anything you find interesting.

Hopefully you like the design; we’ve not changed too many things from the previous version as we’ve tried to keep focused on cleaning things up rather than creating new issues that come with a whole new redesign. If you see any issues with the site then leave a comment and we’ll look at getting them fixed, if not then feel free to leave a comment anyway.

Added: If you do notice anything awry then I find Ctrl+F5 is fixing most stuff.