Our old site featured a lot of animated eye candy that was more a demonstration of our scripting prowess than a truly useful navigational affordance. The redesign, Code Name: Placid, features a more traditional three column layout that should be easier to integrate with dynamic PHP-based subsystems like this blog, which will eventually merge much more tightly with our website proper. Our markup is also much lighter this time around as we were able to replace a lot of structural hooks and CSS2 code with more direct CSS3 declarations. The actual layout itself is based on the Faux Absolute Positioning technique. We also make minimal use of javascript to play a brief audio greeting the first time someone arrives on our site regardless of which page they land on. Finally, we are using Google’s Web Fonts to enhance the overall legibility of our copy.

Invoking the automatic upgrade link took us to the usual upgrade page, but nothing happened after the initial upgrade message was drawn on the page.

Disabling all of our active plugins did seem to free up the Automatic Upgrade process, although one data error was reported.

It also looks like some of our old plugins stopped working after the upgrade. We will wait to see if they get upgraded in a next few weeks before permanently deleting them.

Here you can find up to the minute reports of all the major javascript based libraries and related tools that you can use to take a site to the next level. You’ll also find discussions of hot web accessibility topics like yesterday’s revelation that many screenreader users have javascript enabled — a situation not contemplated by most site designers.

You can also sign up for newsletters, grab podcasts, and find out about the latest conferences and job offers.

The site also features rich indexing by topic in the left sidebar, making it is easy to go back in time and bring yourself up to speed in any area of interest.

While its homepage is rather sedate and has shown less activity of late than in years past, the site’s many high quality articles have remarkable breadth and depth.

Here you will find detailed expositions of most of the web design techniques that undergird today’s state-of-the-art. Alongside such technical content, you will also find discussions of accessibility, information architecture, and the business side of web design and engaging designers.

In short, there is something here for everyone.

Since we are working on a major look-and-feel upgrade for our site, we have installed this temporary WordPress Theme along with the update to save the time it would have taken to retrofit our old custom theme.

All of us at the IEUC wish you a safe and Happy New Year’s Eve.

In other news, we are also working on a major revision of our static pages to simplify their organization and better support a certain legacy web browser that is still used by a significant percentage of our site’s visitors who no doubt can’t upgrade due to institutional decisions outside their control.

Installation on our end was completely painless.

Do let us know how you like it or if you run into any problems viewing this content on your device!

Planned features include, back-end PHP versioning integrated with third party browser detection, nested grid layout using Faux Absolute Positioning, automatic detection of font size changes, auto-balancing columns, and custom rounded corners based on the Canvas element and images embedded in our source code via DataURI’s.

When done, we will concatenating and minimizing everything so our pages should load significantly faster at low connection speeds.

Of significantly more interest to other web masters, we will also be releasing the source code, so you will be able to use our framework on your site.

We also strongly recommend that if you are one of the dwindling number of Internet Explorer 6 users, you should upgrade to a modern browser like Chrome, Safari, Opera, or Firefox at your earliest convenience. Any of these browsers are far more capable and standards compliant that IE 6.

Accordingly, we will no longer be supporting IE 6 when we next revise our pages.

IE 6 users should still be able to read our substantive content in a bare bones format. But we will no longer invest the countless hours needed to hack our code in a futile attempt to fully replicated a modern browser experience for IE 6 users.

Things are finally settling down and we have completed all of our annual paperwork.

Indeed, our 2008 990-EZ has already been received by the IRS and we have a new Cumulative Annual Report ready for distribution.

We will be posting these key documents this week and updating our main pages to reflect these new offerings as soon as possible.