Alex's Journal

As I said in my last post, Wide Open Art is finally open. I am using the domain for a personal online portfolio to show off my photography, digital art, writing, web and graphic design, etc. The design process has been long and quite tedious, but I have to say that I’ve enjoyed it.

I started with the idea of kind of a wooden background with Polaroid-style photos adorning the sides of the page, but when trying to find a decent wood texture for the background, I ran into the old paper textures and decided to use those for the background of the main part of the page. From there I decided maybe I would do kind of a book on a wooden background kind of style. I really like the way it turned out.

My biggest concerns about the design, however, are the loading speed and its compatibility with Internet Explorer 6. Because the site uses large images as the background, it loads dreadfully slow in my opinion. I’m not exactly sure how I can speed that up and keep the same design. Although I suppose it might not be that big of a deal because I don’t expect the site to really be a high traffic site. The issue with compatibility with Internet Explorer 6 is transparent PNGs. According to Microsoft, in Internet Explorer 7, they fixed the issue with the Alpha channel in PNGs allowing PNG images to have transparency. The problem is that not a lot of Internet Explorer users have upgraded to version 7 and the design uses a lot of transparent PNGs.

I know there are workarounds for the problem in Internet Explorer 6, but I decided not to implement them because first of all, I can’t test them since I don’t have access to Windows, and secondly because it’s time for Internet Explorer uses to update to version 7 anyway.