New Theme Preview

[Toxikk Veteran]

First off. I would like to thank the admins of this wonderful community for giving me the opportunity to do this. I also would like to thank Long for coming up with such a wonderful design. The community... You all rock. You are the ones that make this place what it is. This one is for you. I am not getting paid to do this. I do this for the love of the community and for the love of web coding.

But most importantly... Redmak. You have helped me get this project to a place that I did not think I could get it to. I was totally skeptical about XHTML 1.0 Strict when I started, but you stuck with me and helped me eliminate the issues and, together, we got the damn thing validated. That rocks! I really appreciate you being there for me and assisting me along the way. You have made it really easy for me to get caught up in this and want to do it the best that I can. I hope you get some free time from doing all this front-end stuff and can focus on doing what you do best. That backend. :)

Now. Let me tell you straight up. The main reason why I thought this would never happen is because I never thought that I would get the chance. I have recently been "reborn" to web coding. (thanks Molly) Going for something this big ... something that the web standards community covets ... something I thought was totally out of my league. COMPLIANCE. Not just any compliance. XHTML strict compliance. That is a huge reason why I doubted myself in the early stages of this and I totally pulled something out that even I could never dream of (thanks again REDMAK!!).

As for me being reborn to coding. I was a table coder before. ALL I could do was tables. But as I learned about semantic coding by utilizing simple markup in the HTML and using CSS... I knew that I had to get my fire going again. I knew that I could help the place I love. I never really understood the power of CSS until now. And I still do not know everything. But, as it stands right now ... there is only ONE table on the entire mainpage. And it used how tables should be used. To display data. If you look at the screenshot that is being attached you will see that this table holds the Microsoft Build Numbers content. :devil:

I gotta tell you now. There are still some issues. A few bugs are still open. And a couple of things are not yet complete. I would say it is at about 85% right now.

Some of what is yet to be completed:

- top news post area

- sidebar needs to be programmed more

- header for recent posts

- creating new news entry with valid markup output

- add title attributes to those links that are still missing it

- add browser detect and exclude out of date browsers such as ie5.0 -- will be sent to download page at ms

Some of the bugs:

- some sizing problems in ie5.5 due to the box model. i will be installing the box model hack to eliminate this issue

- sometimes the recent posts bleed out of the background. simple to eliminate by modifying the backend code

- need to fix border code for news posts -- remove from being inline and put in ext CSS

The worst bug was squashed I think... I had a nasty scrolling bug inside of the news divs. I had to rebuild the entire set of new posts. But, it was for the best. What you could do was put your mouse inside the news post heading and then drag the mouse down and the text would scroll out of view. Weird stuff.

ANYWAYS....

Drumroll please. Here it is. The screenshot. This is a shot of the live code. Taken from Firefox. But I can assure you that so far the page looks almost 100% the same in each browser... give or take some percent on the font ;) Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari... all money.

Let me know what you think.

[Long]

Yay. Go you! Keep it up Toxikk :D

I tell you everyone, Toxikk has gone through a lot making this, I've given him quite a hard time. :D

[Zero1]

Looks great Toxikk :D

great work

great design too Long ;)

[nwBen]

GO WITH IT! :woot:

[Si Veteran]

Awesome! Great work Toxikk (Y)

[WishX]

You forgot to add:

Enter the Forums

Enter the Chat

Register on the Forum

View Control Panel

View Active Posts

View Newest Posts

Instead of the original:

Enter the Forums

Register on the Forum

View Control Panel

View Active Posts

View Newest Posts

The chat link was probably added while you were finalizing this theme, though.

I'm also eager to see how the vertical slide works for the "Software/Hardware/Gaming/Security/Favourites" menu. (Oh yeah... and be prepared for people to say "In America, it's spelled Favorites!", but whatever.)

However, I do have to say (as I always do), it's Brilliant!

Kudos to Long as well for the original inspiration (if I'm not mistaken). :)

[Toxikk Veteran]

The chat link was probably added while you were finalizing this theme, though.

indeed

[enigma-penguin Veteran]

dude awsome job.. keep up the great work... i like those colours

i see that the slider is truncating long names too.. awsome

id love to see that come to final... and strict.. thats one hell of an effort :yes:

well done to you all and especially our coderator

[b3njo]

nice! but i think the neowin logo is...ummm..seems out of place? Everything else is perfect! (Y)

[Khujo]

Nice work toxi, damn dogg beautiful work like i told you before!

[Toxikk Veteran]

nice! but i think the neowin logo is...ummm..seems out of place? Everything else is perfect! (Y)

it is positioned with css. i can move it anywhere by the pixel. it does look kinda weird now that i look at it ;)

ill move it up and over a few pixels.

[b3njo]

no, what i meant was the color of the logo and top dark blue bar does not match...its better if the logo is somewhat 'embedded' with the blue bar... is there any chance the neowin logo will be redesigned too?

[Toxikk Veteran]

no, what i meant was the color of the logo and top dark blue bar does not match...its better if the logo is somewhat 'embedded' with the blue bar... is there any chance the neowin logo will be redesigned too?

ahh i see what you mean.

it is a possibility i imagine. but not positive.

[Jerry Grey Member]

:D Good Job!!

[Guest Dan C]

Great job Toxikk! :D

[#Michael]

That has to be one of the most beatuifuly designed sites I have seen. (Y) (Y) thumbs up for a great job.

[Toxikk Veteran]

one thing that i forgot to mention was that the art has not really been compressed for web. all of that will happen near the end. i have already contacted my optimizing resource.

[aem4162]

i have no idea of what XHTML 1.0 Strict, table coder, and "semantic coding by utilizing simple markup in the HTML" are, but it looks REALLY COOL. i wish i knew the stuff you know!

(Y)(Y)

[Chode]

That theme looks suh-weet.

I want it very badly......

*cough*in my pants*cough*

:blink:

[giga Veteran]

Wow. Very nice job toxikk. (Y)(Y) I especially love the smooth colors on the news posts and forum posts. :yes:

But things I wish would change:

1. The top. The dark top isnt going with the rest of the site. It looks like a matte color sitting on top of everything else thats smooth and silky. Kind of stands out...its like out of place. :/

[Glowstick]

The data on the dev server isn't up to date :_(

[Oblivion]

Isnt all the stuff a lil too close to each other, if you know what i mean :)

[SMeK Veteran]

looking pretty spiffing,

fancy making a widescreen mod, for those of us with widescreen latops/monitors :D ;)

[dL]

THIS IS AWESOME^100

USE IT!! It's the best EVER!!!

Woah... 10/10.

dL

[[ timko ]]

Looking very good so far Toxikk (Y) :)

Although the sideways section tabs (software, hardware, gaming etc) could prove a tricky for first time viewers of the site. They would have to tilt their heads slightly to the left in order to see properly what it says. I know this wouldn't necessarily be a major thing for someone to do but it can prove discomforting for some people. Plus in general it's best to try and make the visitor's attempt to find information as easy as possible. Having the text this way slows them down at first. Granted, it's not by much but it is still extra effort required of the user.

Like I said it probably would only really affect new comers, they would get use to it after a while and know what each section is just by looking at the color strip at the bottom.

Just some constructive points, hope they're not taken the wrong way :)