Wow, the people of Lawrence, KS should be proud.
Looking for web building inspiration like I always do, I stumbled upon lawrence.com and was amazed.
Not just the visual design, which I have to say is some of the most beautiful I’ve seen on the web in a frequently-updated newspub (most sites of elegant design tend to be for static uses like movie sites or corporations), but the code is fairly clean. Granted… The CSS is massively bloated to my standards (22kb), it’s a flaw I’d definitely live with.
Ideas to take into account for my own future reference:
- iPod or cell friendly features. Lawrence has a mini city guide that’s downloadable that you install as iPod notes and can browse & read anywhere.
- Why did I not realize you can assign more than one class to an HTML object? i.e., lawrence has this for their inline photos (example article):
{div class="inline inline-right"}...{/div}Note that it takes the CSS of class inline and then inline-right. Makes the CSS a lot easier to template so you can overlap things. (i.e. all inline boxes share that inline class.)
- RSS of everything. Chase & Brian have that lined up for the next ‘eater already. And customizable, even.
- Design is amazing. Colors and transitions are great. (Transition, i.e. how the top menu has that page tear effect and goes into the top logo or the top story.) Sweet separation of columns on the main page. (i.e. Calendar and Local Video) Colors pop pretty well but aren’t overwhelming. White bg and black text still dominate but it isn’t boring.
Heh, Django. That’s what the ‘eater is using next year as the backend framework and I think it’s amazing how theoretically modular it is. Apparently Django was originally used (and maybe even designed for use) on lawrence.com, The Lawrence Journal-World, and KUsports.com. Which I think is disgusting. I suppose it’s time that MU gets back to being the best damned journalism school in the world. Starting with the student paper, lol. (And kicking KU’s ass, of course.)
Delusions of grandeur, I’m sure. I kind of want this opportunity to grow into something big huge.
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As an aside, this site’s probably going back down on Tuesday because of connection problemos at my house, which is where this site’s server runs out of. We’ll see what happens after that.
