New Changes to Site

If you haven’t noticed yet, I’ve been making changes to the main site over the last few days.

First, I’ve gotten rid of the LightBox (SubModal) and made each trailer an individual page with it’s own header and links. I did this due to several factors. First, depending on the description, it was hard to judge how big to make the modal window. Then there was the fact that people would share links directly to the individual trailers page (which is expected) and it’s hard to discover how to get back to the main site to see more trailers. The experience just wasn’t ideal.

Next I’ve removed the Digg scripts from both the main indices (plural of index) as well as the individual trailer pages and gone with a simpler link sharing code I borrowed from Sociable. You’ll notice that the blog also has this feature enabled. Sociable is a WordPress plug-in, but I just borrowed the code and used it on the main page. I may implement my own voting system later in the future, but for now, that’ll remain on my TO-DO list.

Then there was the navigational changes. First I now have giant left and right arrows for navigating between index pages, while removing the navigation links that used to be below the trailer images. Next, on every individual trailer page, you’ll see links to the next and previous trailers, so you can continue browsing without having to go back to the index. At first I wanted to do arrows on these pages as well, but I also wanted to provide some visual hint to what the next trailer is. I haven’t found a good way to merge an arrow with the trailer image yet, but when I do, you’ll see it.

You’ll also notice the next/previous links on the individual trailer pages to be stationary. The reasoning for this is that if I just want to quickly go through trailers, I won’t have to move my mouse to where the next link is to continue. I’ve always hated sites that didn’t have a stationary next/previous links.

I also changed around how the tables were laid out. Apparently the <tr> no longer supports the height attribute and for some reason the cell heights are automatically assigned. I was able to hack it in Firefox by creating a giant cell that pushes things up, but IE7 just didn’t like whatever I threw at it. Now I’ve just merged the title and descriptions into 1 giant cell so I won’t hit this weird problem.

More changes will come later as I find some more free time.