This is the first incarnation of the newly reborn Arvola.com website. As a web developer, it seemed silly to not have a proper website. It is something like a portfolio to web people, and now here it is... partly, at least.

I'm sure no one will actually read these posts, but they shall exist for my own use, for posterity. And it is thus a fitting start to go over some of my design philosophies that brought the website about.

Visual

The design is what one would call minimalistic. It tries to keep as little as possible on the screen to give emphasis to the content. I'm more interested in presentation than people surfing the site, so things like latest posts, tags, archives and so forth, are not really necessary.

One significant feature to the design is the fact that there are no images in the site design. This does not mean that the content has no images of course, but everything aside from the actual content is image-free. With the new features of CSS 3.0 gaining ground in modern browsers, it is becoming less and less necessary to create effects with images. It also seems to be partially a trend currently, more websites crop up that use CSS features rather than images for things that would've been an image not more than a year ago.

So instead of images, the visual design's central resources are embedded fonts using @font-face. Specifically, Google Web Fonts. I am very excited about this open source font offering from various contributors, and Google has done a nice job of centralizing them into something very easy to use. Unfortunately, there are still some major bumps in the road with embedded fonts, the biggest of which is poor anti-aliasing on Windows browsers. I'll get to the details of that in another article.

I'm sadly not well-versed in typography, so the visual style of the text in use may not be entirely perfect yet. With this website, I intend to learn about typography - reading about it while attempting to put it into practice. I realize I'm likely never going to be great at it, but having a working understanding of it should be quite useful.

Behind the site

Websites have a lot of things in common. The technology is generally similar, and since they all have to rely on HTTP, they all have to work more or less in the same way. This means that there are certain pieces that you need to recreate for each website. They may look and act slightly differently, but they still perform the same function. This can encompass highly technical aspects like searching the page structure for a specific element, or more practical things like displaying a dialog with an image.

Fortunately, there are many existing solutions that someone has already made available for public use. Some of them are commercial, but a lot of them are open source. Pardon the philosophical moment, but I think if anything at this time gives me hope and confidence towards the human existence, it is seeing these great works of software engineering being distributed for everyone to use.

I strongly believe giving credit where it is due, and so the entire footer of the website is dedicated to displaying the technologies, platforms and libraries this website is made with. I've not yet implemented it fully, but I plan to have a hover over tooltip for each of them to further elaborate their use. With Drupal, a list of modules and with jQuery, a list of additional plugins.

In Conclusion

The website is of course still in its infancy at the time of this post. As time allows, I'll add features and sections to it to slowly build it up. The concept of a "finished website" is highly dubious anyway. For something to be finished, it needs to be by some measure static, and anything static on the internet will quickly be forgotten.