Revised Solsbury Hill Page FAQ
Q: Wooooah! What happened here?
A: As you can see, the Hill has been redesigned a bit.
Q: But...but...why?
A: We had thought about doing a redesign for a long time, but (1) with all the news rolling in, we just didn't have the time to focus on both material and a design overhaul (2) we had no idea of what to change to design to (3) no one ever commented, good or bad, on our design, which led us to believe that people didn't really care as long as we kept writing.
But at the same time, we were tired of looking at the same format, and wanted something more sophisticated. Fortunately, we found someone foolish...er, clever enough to volunteer to make the redesign happen, which solved most of our problems.
Q: Obviously you guys don't have the talent to pull this off. Who did it for you?
A: Okay, it was long-time Hill reader and contributor Brad Cornelius.
Q: How did all of this come about?
A: About the middle of July, we got an e-mail from Brad. He said something to the effect of, "Don't take this the wrong way, but I redesigned your site. Nothing is wrong with the way it looks now, but I'm experimenting with web design and wondered if you'd like this." Then he gave us a link to his test site that's somewhat similar to what you see now, except the main color was burnt orange, there was a pixelated version of our coffee cup, and a cool pixelated picture of PG to match. It was much cleaner design, easier to navigate, and just oozed professionalism. However, we knew it still needed work.
So we wrote Brad and said, "Your design rocks! We want to use it! But we'd like to suggest a few changes so it fits our style more."
Brad said, "It shall be done!"
We suggested a more friendly color than burnt orange, and we suggested the appropriate cyan, aka sky blue. This change was done quickly by Brad.
Then the Solsburian Graphics Sub-committee thought that since the picture of PG on the left side was going to feature so prominitely, it would be great if there was some way for the picture to randomly change every time someone visted or hit reload. Brad said, "I like that idea!" After doing much research, he discovered one way that would rotate the pictures, but it would only work for three pictures. That was all well and good, but we originally wanted to have a least eight pictures to rotate from.
So the Solsburian Graphics Sub-committee did some research on javascript to try to come up with something that would allow more pictures to be used. After stealing some code from this site and playing with the code a bit, we found something that would randomize the pictures, and there seemed no limit on how many pictures could be used. The trick was getting it to work with Brad's design. At first Brad had trouble getting it to work, but get it to work he did, and added eighteen pictures to put in the rotation files. Yay!:)
We also debated over a graphic icon to replace the yellow coffee mug. At first we wanted to keep it, but then we realized it just didn't look right. We tried playing with the color, but to no avail. So then Brad found a cute graphic of a cup and saucer setup. It looked nice, but we're *mug* people. Ingemar photoshopped this cool blue mug, we were 99% percent sure we wanted to go with it before we then decided it was too tall and too...blue. Finally Brad talked us into the white mug that's up there now.
Once all of that was taken care of, it was just a matter of us being able to learn how to maintain the new format for ourselves so we can tweak it without having to bother Brad for everything. After learning how to use Adobe GoLive, we were able to transfer all of the material on the old design to the new design. And volia!
Q: Anyone else help out?
A: Oh mai oui! Kari, Typhoo, Scott, Polo, Stickgirl, Intruder, Ingemar and others were asked to give their opinions and to beta test the site.
Q: How long did it take for the redesign to be created?
A: Brad said that it only took him a few hours to create the basic template. It didn't take long to make changes either...what took the most time was communicating back and forth saying, "How about this? What about this?" The whole picture change java script was initially a pain, too, but that was taken care of over a weekend.
We initially were planning on going live with the redesign either on Oct. 10, the Hill's birthday, or Sept. 24, the U.S. release date for Up. But because things were going relatively smoothly, and also because we wanted to focus on content over design, we decided to upload this weekend.
Because we love our readers so much, we were able to get the job done, and done right, weeks ahead of schedule.
To a certain musician out there...are you paying attention to this? Ahead of schedule. Got that? It can be done! Ahead of schedule! Beating the deadlines by a country mile, and loving it!
We're doing the "ahead of schedule" dance, a dance of which some people will never know.
Q: Was this redesign done because some pinhead criticized the Hill on alt.music.peter-gabriel?
A: No, Brad and the Committee were deep into the design stages when the pinhead posted. Plus, we had several friends of the Hill look at the beta version before the trite post was made. This was an odd coincidence since as noted above, no one ever commented on the design beforehand. Thankfully, several honorary Solsburians battled the pinhead thus making his comments ineffective and the joy was put back into the redesign project. Through it all, we decided to continue to keep the redesign a secret, although it was tempting to post and say, "Oh yeah? We'll show you!"
Q: I think the site looks too serious now! I miss the quirky image flips!
A: Hey, we'd like to think our irreverence lies in the content, and that isn't going to change. As far as the image flips go, the only one which could be called brilliant is the one for the humor page. In our infinite wisdom, we put that particular image flip on the humor page itself so you can flip away to your heart's content.
Q: I miss the yellow coffee mug!
A: Yeah, that was kinda our trademark, wasn't it? Oh well. Here it is! --->