User blog:NoGround/Watching Everything Come Together

There comes a point in web design where all of a sudden you notice that what you're working on starts to look good. It kind of frightened me today. I've gotten a lot of work done since the last blog update, and just wanted to show you how much a tiny bit of editing here and there can do.

Category Pages
If you've read my other blog posts, you should know that I have an intense dislike for Category Pages, mainly because they're ugly. They serve a great purpose, though: they're useful for advanced site navigation and organization. Some wikis are much better due to their expansive lists, such as the HTML and CSS Wiki and Templates Wiki, but ones like ours should be more stylized. One thing to note though, is that they need to retain their usability. People browsing the wiki need to be able to quickly navigate through the site in multiple ways, be it through Category Navigation, Navboxes, the main Navbar, direct URL editing, etc. Not having a number of options to navigate through a website is bad.

Anyway, for looks, I've designed the Characters and Monsters pages. (If you've been here before I also made a recent discovery for style called "border-spacing" that allowed me to remove the whitespace between cells on a table). They're simple, mostly text, but categorized in a way that I hope prevents confusion. I haven't gotten or reached out for feedback on them yet, but I'm pretty satisfied. Later, when the anime comes out, we may possibly be able to switch over to an Character Portal image based system. The only issue with this is that it won't look good on Mobile, but wikis like this one are generally not browsed on Mobile, so I'm not too worried about that. If I was, I wouldn't be using Tables at all!

Homepage
I've taken the homepage another step further. I took the Template:Maintop from here and added a slider. I also moved some information into the content box, and moved the media links (from the now removed media and help box) to the content box. Really, it wasn't much, but it changed the look of the homepage for the better. We're actually starting to look like an fan-wiki now! I have some misgivings about the content directly underneath the Slider, and have some ideas for that (like a div made to look like a line). That's advanced CSS, so most wiki editors won't have a damn clue about what I'm doing there.

Misc Tasks
Other than those two big things, most of the time has been spent doing basic editing, like filling in all of Kumoko's stat sheets up to the end of Volume 3 (and other characters), editing System page, and drafting ideas for Skills and Magic. These are things anyone can do, and if you've read my Communication and Design blog post, you know that I consider these to be minor tasks on my priority list. Still, they generally just end up being things I do whenever. I probably shouldn't leave the Skills page like that though...

Ciao~