As I mentioned earlier the subtle changes in the design of Not So Well Exposed were made to boost efficiency. Basically, I wanted to cut back in all the clicking and dragging and give users everything upfront. Less clicks = better for the users. Comments are right under the photos, not hidden like they used to be, social sharing is next to the permalink and the Series disappeared, now all images are under one roof. The thing about the Series is helpful. Until now visitors had to go to a new portion of the website, but now, all the images are right there, they just have to sit back and enjoy.

But the most important change is that now the images are at their full web resolution, not like before when the site was relying on a Lightbox environment to show the large image. My main concern about having the content fit in a page came from a talk with a friend who didn’t like scrolling on the vertical images, which made me think about having everything fit above the fold. But, after checking my analytics, I noticed that most my visitors use higher resolutions than 1280 by 1024. So, yeah, there is a bit of scrolling involved for the vertical images, but, I really don’t think it has any bad effects on the user. With the changes in the Series section especially, I want users to explore the area beneath the fold. Also, having the freedom of using things beneath the fold I could do that large footer that exists now on all pages, but I’ll come back to that in a second. Also, users with lower resolutions do not despair! As long as you are using a modern browser (as in “not using Internet Explorer 8 or lower”) you will see a version that fits your screen properly due to CSS Media Query. It appears as responsive websites are the new black in web design, so I jumped in the band wagon because it truly is a great feature (at least for non-handheld devices).

Now, what was I saying about the footer… Oh, yeah, it’s great. Besides the regular things, like contact info and local links I added, what I like to call, “the social part”, or the “Elsewhere”. Here I have links to social sites I use and are “sanitized” for a more businessy use. And my favourite part of the footer is the colophon where I can pretty much credit the developers that made the awesome tools I used, not to mention brag about my skills. It’s a win-win situation.

While trying to keep things simple I ditched all that massive reliance on JavaScript and limited it’s use only to those things necessary (like keyboard navigation). I also improved the semantics on Not So Well Exposed. But the big thing is that new HTML5 and CSS3 experimental couple everyone is talking about. Do websites have to look the same in every browser? Off course not. So, if you are using a modern browser (there it goes again) you may experience some awesome subtle effects. But browsers treat differently these new things, so you may be experiencing only a couple of effects if you are using Firefox or Opera compared to WebKit browsers (Chrome and Safari). On my machine, Not So Well Exposed looks best on Safari (which I only use for testing, Chrome’s my default) because on Chrome the dropshadows break the kerning of the links.

That’s about it for this part, but I still have one more topic to discuss about Not So Well Exposed, and that is mobile support. The article should come out in the following days.