Site update : new look

As regular readers may have noticed, facquet.com got a fresh new look this september.

This new look is probably a lot less innovative than the previous one, as it is typical to what’s made nowadays in terms of web designs.

This is a fixed width layout optimised for 800px resolutions and higher, which is not without reminding what is often seen in weblogs. Graphics are clearly XPished (the green hill is probably not unrelated to this feeling...), with a colour palette build upon a paler version of the good old RGB (Red-Green-Blue).

Regarding fonts, the default one is Trebuchet MS, a font designed for easy on screen reading, shipped with Microsoft’s products (Windows, Office, IE, Web-font-pack) for enough years that most people now have it installed. Others switched back to the classical Arial-like family.

Except for the front page, the layout hasn’t changed too much from the previous design.

And, most importantly, the design is still 100% tableless, in true semantic XHTML strict. I haven’t checked mechanical validity yet though, but there shouldn’t be any unfixable glitch.

With XHTML and true tableless CSS, accessibility is close to excellent. This site used to pass the WAI "double-A" conformance; as I increased the level of embeded descriptions, this can only be better. However, I’m afraid reaching the AAA isn’t for tomorrow due to a requisite incompatible with the use of a CMS engine, mine being already tuned to give its best in this area.

Last thing, this new set of templates is the occasion for me to experiment with "non-obstructive" DHTML. You’ll see a brand new animated menu, as well as dynamic tooltips. These are designed not to break the XHTML DOM, nor to prevent navigability with browsers without or disabled javascript. It’s been tested on all major browsers (IE win, Mozilla/FireFox, Opera), but I fear of results with aged non-standard browsers.

For the posterity, here is what facquet.com used to look in the previous twelve months:

Previous look of facquet.com