Fresh Slant on Sawdust & Glass
23 January 08
Photo by ercwttmn
Third Fresh Slant Blog Review
This week’s Fresh Slant Blog Review goes to Jamie who designed Sawdust & Glass.
If you would like more information on Project Fresh Slant and would like your blog to be featured here at Fresh Geeks’ Blogging Tips & Blogging Guides, see the original Project Fresh Slant announcement, and the Fresh Slant update and FAQ.
Blog Profile
Title: Sawdust & Glass
Authors: Ron & Ann Oastler
Designer: Jamie Oastler (see Jamie’s Web Portfolio)
Description: ‘Stained Glass & Woodworking artists sharing their products and knowledge with the world.’
Niche: Artists, home-based craft businesses, Stained glass, Woodworking, Woodturning
Goals: Jamie has three main goals for Sawdust & Glass
Goals for Sawdust & Glass
-Connect with other artists about different types of products to create and the methods used to construct them.
-Generate strong search results for potential local (Kingston, Ontario Canada) clients interested in our products.
-Engage in a regular communication with past clients about new things we are doing to generate more regular business.
About the Oastler’s & Sawdust & Glass
Jamie’s parents have been creating unique stained glass, fused glass, and wood pieces as a home business since 1998. Shortly thereafter, Jamie created Sawdust & Glass for them to host on their ISP site.
It wasn’t much more than a contact page and some pictures, but they liked it. A few years later Jamie moved them over to their current URL, and built a product display site around a thumbnail creation software.
The process was very labour intensive. It would re-generate every page and image in a category each time you added a new product, and this required having to manually upload files by FTP.
You can still see the old site temporarily by going to Sawdust & Glass’ old URL. This will be deleted following the conclusion of this Fresh Slant review series.
Yes, the Oastler’s are aware that none of the product images display in Firefox. That was a main shortcoming with the thumbnail software and a large reason why Jamie wanted to move to something better.
As quoted from Jamie Oastler herself:
“Enter Wordpress. It’s web-based, allows me complete control over template changes without having to re-generate files or alter the process my parents use to enter content - which they are becoming more comfortable with by the day.
More importantly, it allows them to begin to blog about the process they go through as artists in creating products, summarize events they display their wares at, and begin to build a better rapport with clients in hopes of generating more new and repeat customers.”
Fresh Slant Blog Review Focus
Jamie would like to focus on the design and accessibility of Sawdust & Glass. It is important that readers find Sawdust & Glass is easy to navigate, visually appealing:
1) What do you think of the site? Does it have a good balance of style while not taking away from the focus - their products and content.
2) What web browser/ resolution are you viewing the site in? Are there any “technical” issues / annoyances that you see?
3) What features/functionality do you think we should work towards building into the site which would help to achieve their goals?
If people could also try a print preview of a page or two and confirm that the print version displays on one page with a less graphically intensive header / navigation, that would be much appreciated.
Stay Tuned for Blogging Toolbox
Instead of starting off the discussion as I did in previous Fresh Slant blog reviews, I’ll be featuring ‘The Blogging Toolbox’ posts to highlight blogging tips & guides coming from the blogging community, Wordpress plugins, free web-developing applications, and whatever may be of use to us bloggers.
The highlights in ‘The Blogging Toolbox‘ posts will be mainly based on the needs or points brought out from Fresh Slant blog reviews.
Well, have fun supporting Sawdust & Glass, and I’m looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts.
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It appears the site is running into a few issues with browser windows that are just smaller than 1024 x 768 in width - either the user resizes their window smaller or might have their status bar pinned to the left/right. In those cases the main content portion of the page gets pushed down below the fold. The two users who have reported it got the impression that “there was nothing to the rest of the site” and that the navigation links didn’t do anything (because the page would reload but off the bottom of their screen.
I must figure out a way for this fixed width pixel based design to degrade more gracefully. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Hey Jamie, you can try browsershots to test your site in different browsers. Thanks for the update.
I had used Browsershots before launching, but their choice of 1024 x 768 has machines / screenshots which behave like one expects that resolution to.
I ran into the same issue in submitting my site to CommandShift3, so I really wanted to find an optimal solution to get a sense of where that design stacks up against some other artist / boutique displays.
The resolution to the issue was to switch from both divs (sidebar, page) from float:left to sidebar as float:left and page as float:right. This means the horizontal scroll-bar will display in the smaller screen scenarios, but I also tweaked the presentation to be 980 pixels wide, so the scroll-bar will display in fewer cases.