Drawar

While I'd love to take your money, it doesn't look like you're too far away from success, to me. There are a few little errors on the home page according to the validation, and it looks and works fine in IE7, except for the pop-up message, which I laughed at the first time, but it got quickly annoying when it popped up on every page. ;)

When I need to tweak for IE6/7, I write additional style sheets, including only those declarations that need to be there to make the site work for IE6/7, and call them in like this:

<!--[if lte IE 6 ]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="includes/ie_style.css" />
<![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 7.0]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="includes/ie7_style.css" />
<![endif]-->

Works great, though it's probably not the only solution, nor the most elegant. I must admit, I do enjoy beating IE into submission, most of the time. :)

Using a separate stylesheet for IE6 users, you feel changes can be made whereby the site would work perfectly on their browser?

As pretty as those expanding and collapsing lists are, are they really necessary? I actually found them rather an annoying feature on an otherwise aesthetically pleasing site design.

I'm willing to bet they're what's giving you the most problems with other browsers too, right?

If you want my advice, consider dropping them.

I know this isn't really what you asked for, though.

(And it's nice to see another British 9ruler!)

Also, if you do keep them, is it possible to make the whole bar clickable rather than just the small text link at the end? With the width of the site, it's quite a journey to get my mouse all the way over there to expand them.

@CK, I don't really know the answer to that without digging much further than I did since I don't know what you're using for the expanding/collapsing bit on the site, so I don't know, but it would seem to be worth a shot, at least. That's just how I handle it whenever IE6 completely borks, which is most of the time anyway.

I have an expanding/collapsing list set up on this page, and it works fine in IE6. I realize that it's probably much less complicated than what you may be dealing with, but maybe you could look at it and modify it to suit what you want?

This current theme is an interim thing. Ideally I'm after something along the lines of a few sandbox type themes around - 5Thirtyone and Subtraction, for example, where each category would be listed on the page with the latest post or two from each. But that's all way off in the distant future (there's someone lined up to code that but they're not free until August, unfortunately).

Back to what I'm working with currently, I agree with having the bar completely clickable. If getting shelves working in IE6 proves unworkable for people (I have no chance of figuring it out), then I'll go about starting on the new look and leave it as it is, which would be sad.

Craig, how's this look? :-)

Here's what I did:

* Turned all your pngs into gifs (except the logo) - We had to convert the pngs into gifs because of the weak support in IE6 for transparency in pngs, and well, weak support for pngs in general.
* Commented out the Javascript error message for IE - The designer added an alert preventing anything from happening if the page detected an IE browser. I commented that out by adding // to the front of the line. When you make this change on the page, make sure you also hit delete at the end of the line so that "next line" comes onto "the current line", as the "next line" also needs to be commented-out.

The page now works reasonably well in IE6 and IE7, as long as you let the page load before clicking. Impatient clickers get sent to another page. As a workaround, you can link the currently-blank href to a Wordpress archive or category page. That way, patient clickers will see the full glory of your page, and impatient clickers will load your regular archive or category page.

To save you from having to find the changed files manually, here are the other files (besides craig.htm) that I fiddled with.

That is pretty darn neat and bloody good going; I know nothing.

I assume there's no way of using .gifs for the shelving yet the .png for the 'halo' around the main posts' content area? I guess no initially due to the transparency, but I wonder how it would display should they be used.

Thinking about it further, can it even be possible to keep the site as it is currently, but when it detects IE6 being used, that it loads up the .gifs as you've just done, Bob?

Craig, check it out.

You mentioned you wanted to see the 'halo' around the main posts' content area. Perhaps you're referring to the fact that the "inside the shelving" area wasn't showing either a png or gif properly as a background image in IE6? To fix that, I deleted the reference to a background-image, and just used a background color. The background-image is just a solid color, so I'm not sure why the original designer decided to use a background-image at all. I had to tweak the padding to make the "edges" line up, but I think now it looks exactly the same as the old version, except it works in IE6 and IE7.

You can just look at the style.css file (same link as before) for changes.

Did I win? :-)

Bobby, that's brilliant; the shelves no longer load half at a time. Simply fantastic.

I've taken some comparison screenshots of what I meant by the 'halo'. If this is something you can fix, I think the money's on its way to you. :-)

The Halo: The top being the site currently, and the bottom image being your brilliant new version as it is currently.

Craig,

OK, I see what you mean. Please take a look at the new version, which is at the same location as before.

Here are the links to the new files.

Here's a summary of what I did:

• First, I made the background image for the header use CENTER as its horizontal location instead of "0". This put the diagonal stripes in the same place, no matter what the browser width is. This is absolutely required before the next steps, if we're going to use regular GIFs instead of alpha-transparent PNGs.
• Second, for the "top halo" on the main content area (top-content.gif), I screenshot'ted the page, put it into Photoshop, selected the 12px high area where we wanted the halo, and cropped the image to that selection. Then, I created a new Layer on top of that Layer where I put a color gradient, with the gradient starting with the light grey color (I think it's #6c6c6c) and ending at "transparent". Then, I reduced the opacity of that gradient layer to 61% (seemed to look best). Then I moved the whole thing left-right, until the diagonal stripes in my new image "matched up" with the diagonal stripes in the centered header image as displayed in the browser. I then added the appropriate CSS to style.css.
• For the "side halos", I created a background image (side-content.gif) that was transparent in the middle, with gradients on the left and right going from the dark grey color (#3b3b3a) to the light grey color (#6a6969). I then added the appropriate CSS to style.css.

It works great in FF and IE7 for me. For IE6, I should note that the "halos" don't appear in the areas hidden by the slider in IE6, but background-images have never worked in those hidden-areas for some reason it would probably take days to figure out. Happily, the background-color I added yesterday does show up, so your site "degrades well" in IE6, at least. :-)

Did I win yet? :-)

Hopefully so, because that was waaaaay more work than I thought it'd be.

-Bob

That is pretty spot on. I like it. I'll see about putting in place once I get home in the evening. If all works out well, I think some money will be working its way to you!

When does it get to the point where bobbyh gets the money? Seems to me it's time to back up your word - he's earned it. And if you aren't going to give him the money - don't ask for anymore help.

And people, running the site through a validator there are 4 validation errors, 7 errors total. All easy fixes.

bobbyh - thank you for helping. You DID do a lot of work and I think you definitely earned the money to compensate you for the time spent. Please update this thread if you received it. :)

I don't favour the implication that I'm not going to pay, but I completely understand why it was said. Wasn't there some chap not to long ago that offered a big cash prize as part of a design competition, but didn't follow it through on some tenuous wording? I forget the guy, but I think a lot of stink was rightfully kicked up about it.

Bobby will certainly get his money, there's no doubt about that. I'm very grateful that someone such as he has managed to sort this out so quickly. I know very little about coding and programming so assistance with these things is very highly sought after.

My reasons for waiting until it's all been applied in practice is merely as a result of poor past experience. I'm confident it will all work perfectly, but there have been times where I have paid in advance or before completion of some projects only for contractors and the like to start dragging their feet or become very hard to make contact with.

Bobby will get paid, and I'll likely pester him with money for similar such things in the future. He's a good man, and I haven't the slightest intention of going back on my word.

It's good you're saying he's getting the money. You said "I think..." a couple of times, even when the issues are basically resolved. It was time for bobbyh to find out if he was getting the money or not. :)

I do see your side. I've been fortunate with design experience but I've seen many people have awful experiences so I definitely see your side. Stating bobbyh was getting the money but there are things that needed to be worked through (and continue working through them) would let bobbyh know he is getting the money, not working in hopes of still getting it, and you're protected as well.

Does that make sense?

Glad it worked out...I love happy endings. :)

And yes there was a contest that ended miserably in the WordPress community. More than one actually. Very sad to see people take advantage like that. And for the record you aren't the only one. I came down hard in another note as well where the original poster was dodging a very legitimate question.

This reminds me of a Family Guy episode where Stewie is collecting on a bet from Brian. He ends up beating the piss out of him, then shooting him in the knee caps after repeatedly saying, "where's my money Brian?"

I just thought I'd share.

Wow, lots of comments!

@Craig: I left a comment on your blog, so you should have my email to contact me privately...

@Tyme: Thanks for your support!

@ryanarrowsmith: Haha, thanks for sharing. :-)

Also, I realized this morning (in the shower, of course) that we can make a simple change to make the site more friendly for IE6 and IE7. To review, the issue is that "[The old version of page] ... works reasonably well in IE6 and IE7, as long as you let the page load before clicking. Impatient clickers get sent to another page." With this new change, if you impatiently click the FIRST bar, nothing will happen. This is actually a good thing, as you won't get taken to another page. Happily, after the page fully loads in IE6 and IE7, clicking those bars "opens" them.

Note: I only fixed the first bar on craig2.htm, so only try clicking on that one.

It's easy to change the other bars too. Here's the simple change. Craig, look for this bit of HTML for each of the "bars":

• <a href="" class="pane_slider">open</a>

and change it to:

• <a href="#" onclick="return false;" class="pane_slider">open</a>

-Bob

All changes made and email sent, my good man! I'll even send you a pile of points.

Thanks, Craig, I got the points and the £80!

P.S. Stewie, if you get this, put down the gun -- I changed my mind! :-)

bobby, what do you do as a profession? Are you a designer-come-programmer of sorts, or is this something you picked up in your own time as a hobby?

I sell ads for an Internet site, but I've been in the web industry for years now, so luckily I've been able to learn things slowly as new standards came out... If I had to learn CSS2, Javascript and XHTML from scratch now, I'd probably be overwhelmed!

In any case, this is mostly a hobby, although I'm starting to pick up some freelance clients now.