Updated VersionTracker site launches
Early last night, I pushed out the fruits of my last few months of labor and launched a subtle redesign (ok, it was probably more of a realign) of the VersionTracker site.
In addition to the visual changes that Rick mentioned in the “official” blog post, there were a huge amount of changes made under the hood that were greatly needed. Not only will these help performance quite a bit, they will also make things easier for future updates (such as re-implementing themes, which Rick also mentioned). One thing Rick didn’t mention in his post was that we’re now using the Yahoo! Interface Library CSS tools.
Yahoo! User Interface Libraries
When I first started working on the new 2-column layout, I decided to scrap pretty much everything we had—at least as far as the HTML and CSS go—and start over. Before beginning work on the layout, I remembered reading about the Yahoo! User Interface Libraries—particularly their CSS tools. I decided to start playing around with what they had to offer and I was hooked. It made creating the layouts we wanted ridiculously easy and saved me a ton of time coding and testing cross-browser since the work was already done. In the end, it went from inception to launch in about a month—including QA—not bad for a site the size of VT. I definitely recommend it if you’re building a site and need to get something up quickly.
Anyway, if you happen to come across this and you’re a VT user, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on performance and page loads (particularly if you think it’s faster than it used to be). You can leave a comment below or you can email me if you prefer.
