Welcome to Fallstock
Hello, and welcome to Fallstock, my contest submition. Of course, this template was really made with you in mind, but if I can get some cash and free hosting, then why not? With this template I'm trying to make something versatile and stylish, yet highly funtional and accessable. See the next section for more on accessability.
I've tried to incorperate the theme of Autumn into this template as much as possible. The color palate is subtle, yet still makes use of a variety of hues. I also focused a lot on textures, and creating contrasts with them. For example, the leaves contrast with the fluffy clouds, and the smooth gradients in the sidebar contrast with the many sharp edges of the template.
Accessability via Web Standards
Theres no point having an incredible looking website if it only looks incredible for a small percentage of web users. With this in mind, I have taken many steps to make Fallstock as accessable as possible. The Xhtml is semantically coded, so the layout will display logically when Css is not supported. Fallstock has been tested in Internet Explorer 6+ and Firefox. Therefore, it should render the same across most other browsers.
You might be asking, so what? Whats the big deal about web standards. Well, heres some practical advantages of having an accessable website:
- Smaller file sizes
- Faster loading times
- A site that looks the same across most broswers
- People with disabilities will have better access to your site
- By using web standards now, it will prepare your site for the future
Tables aren't Evil
As long as you aren't using them to structure your layout. Following is a semantic table, styled with Css, and coded according to web standards. Because tables aren't evil, they're for tabular data.
Broswer | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 |
---|---|---|---|
Firefox | 7.2% | 17.0% | 18.0% |
Netscape | 2.6% | 1.6% | 0.4% |
Internet Explorer | 84.9% | 75.4% | 75.5% |
Opera | 1.9% | 1.8% | 1.1% |
Navigation
Search
Sidebar
You can use this sidebar for navigation, a search box, to post news, or anything really. If you want the gradient background for an element in the sidebar, all you have to do is surround it with span tags. For example, in this paragraph, there is a span tag before and after the paragraph tag. The Css takes care of the rest
About the Designer
Kevin Cannon, aka Frozen, is a 15 year old designer from Vancouver, Canada. I will switch to first person now, to tell you that I believe strongly in web standards, and not compromising style to achieve those standards. If you have any questions, comments, or business offers, you can email me via OSWD.