I am completely stoked about the new version of The Althing that will debut soon. I finally got rolling using HTML-Kit and CSS, thanks in large part to “CSS: The Missing Manual” by David Sawyer McFarland. Very excellent book I would highly recommend to everyone. Of course there were many other online sources here and there from which I picked a little. CSS Layout Generator created the framework everything hangs in. The horizontal menu was a tweak of a menu I saw and liked at the Missing Manual site, while the vertical menu was built online at Listamatic 2.
The original site had a half-ass three column design, with the middle column sometimes split into two columns. Not clean at all. The new design has just two columns, and will stick with two. The right column only had a Google ad, so far, so I swung that over to below the vertical menu on the left. It still leaves the top of the ad peeking above the fold. The whole thing has a fixed width of 960 against a white space background. I eliminated the pukey yellow background all over. Don’t know if it will validate, yet, but I’m not that much of a purist. I’m just real pleased with how it looks, so far. The index page is complete, the template copied over to all the other pages, so now all I have to do is move the content over and reformat it into the new layout. If the index page was any indication, it should be no problem, so the whole new site should be uploaded sometime this week.