JoCoBusiness!

A site redesign was just launched! We've been working on it for a couple months; taken a while due to development of a new content management system. JoCoBusiness has some improvements with our new system. The framework is much more accessible and completely tables free! Of course, this means a lot of testing in many monitor settings and browsers (which still needs much more testing…), but with cursory click throughs in a few browsers on typical monitor settings, it seems okay (I am told widescreen has problems though, oy vei…).

I am happy that it is all CSS with some nice additional features we thought up along the way. Also, turning off the CSS renders the page just as readable for those on a PDA or using a screen reader. Not many people see that aspect of a website, but those who do notice it I hope appreciate it. We have commenting and book reviewing available to people who register, and forums will be coming for registered users to participate in as well! Our news pages have RSS feeds available for the bloglines addicts. 😉 Like I said, some work to be done, but it's coming together nicely. 😀

It's interesting to see where we started with a site and how it ended up. I don't have the original sketches scanned in, but here is one of my initial mock-ups prior to building in the content management system. I think they turned out fairly similar!

The other site I helped implement and was originally supposed to be the first site in our new content management system was JoCoHistory. We have a lot of great ideas for the next phase of this site, but it will not be until next spring (lots of other projects before then). Yay!