I interned at Bose this summer (previously alluded to here, here, and here). I realize that after posting a lot about it before I started, I completely failed to follow up in any way. So, it went well, the guys I worked with were cool, and there may be a job there for me next summer. Their website is redesigned and streamlined, and the masses can breathe freely once again. Unfortunately, as the site is on the Bose intranet, I can’t link to it and show my work.

Near the end of my time there, when the website was basically done but there wasn’t much else for me to do (or when the tedious parts of the job made my brain cry out in pain) I did some reading up on CSS, validation, web standards, and the like. It was very interesting, and looks like a bandwagon I’d like to jump on. The separation of content and presentation (describing each with XHTML and CSS, respectively) appeals to my sense of organization, as does the concept of one file determining the presentation of the entire site.

This version of Lodenocity.com (called Three in my mind, but lacking an official name) was created with those ideas in mind. Unfortunatley, due to several problems with templates and lost stylesheets, my site was down for a bit during my move from Movable Type to Wordpress. Thus, I was trying to get it functional again as quickly as possible, and didn’t stop to make sure it validated. I did use CSS for virtually all presentation for the first time ever, but I got lazy near the end and stuck in a table and a few align=”center”s because I didn’t want to go back into the CSS and define new classes. Also, I’m sure my problems with IE could have been fixed in a better way if I had started the layout over from scratch, but I didn’t feel I had the time. I got a little over zealous with WP’s links list feature and went wild on the right menu bar.

After about a week of constant staring at a computer screen and struggling with trying to make my old layout agree with WP, trying to make a very cool template agree with anything, and trying to get together a decent-looking new layout, I was done. That’s why the comments aren’t very nice-looking and the archive system doesn’t link to individual entries. Somehow I can’t just go back and fix these things- I want a whole new layout, a new beginning. I want something clean-looking and easy on the eyes, which this is not. I’d like something similar to this.

Also, I want to try harder to make the new layout up to web standards and as CSS-ified as possible. Ultimately, I want visitors to the site to be able to switch skins, going from one stylesheet to another depending on their taste. I also want to look into syndication and lovely things like that. Unfortunately, school starts soon and I have lots of homework left to do. The school year itself will probably leave me little time for anything huge on the website front. Oh, well. I can dream.