About sussitout.org
In moving from a daily- to a monthly-publication schedule, we decided it was also high time for a new coat of paint. Which led us to decide on a new content management system. Which led us to WordPress. Which led us here.
This site functions better, faster, and more reliably than our old site, is easier to maintain, and its design is more in line with what we had envisioned for Suss from the beginning. It took longer than we had hoped to get from one to the other, but we’re certain it was worth it.
This site was built by hand for us, by us. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have help.
Generally Speaking
Chris Coyier at CSS-Tricks is pretty awesome. His site—including the forums there—and his & Jeff Starr’s Digging into WordPress book and site were indispensable resources during our building process. These two men deserve a few rounds on the LS & S credit card at some point.
The Imagery
Unless otherwise noted, the bulk share of images on our site come from the public domain, primarily the Flickr Commons. Notable among those that don’t are the RSS feed icons, which were created and made available by Angie Bowen at Arbenting, and the Twitter icon on our homepage, which is from the Practika icon set from Smashing Magazine, designed by DryIcons.
The Typography
The majority of content on the site is set in Garamond (or Georgia if your machine doesn’t support Garamond) and Helvetica Neue (or Arial if...). The main navigation and the headers everywhere but on the homepage are set in Adelle. The main category headers and the titles on the homepage are set in BigSmalls Bold. The drop caps found around the site are set in Aviano Didone. These last three fonts are provided by TypeKit, a truly wonderful service.
The Suss logo utilizes a character from the HEretica font family. Our title up at the top of the page is set in MEgalopolis Extra. These two fonts were designed by Jack Usine for SMeltery and released as Open Type fonts. They too are wonderful. And like to capitalize the second letter of words.
The Fancy Bits
The sliding content on the homepage is made possible with Chris Coyier’s Anything Slider. (We weren’t kidding about his being awesome.) The fading content rotations on the main poetry page are utilizing the jQuery Cycle Plugin developed by Mike Alsup. The expanding-images category navigation at the bottom of most pages (including this one) was adapted from a tutorial by Sam Dunn at Build Internet!. The “cleaner page” effect found on poetry pages was written by us, probably poorly.
A Brief Note about Browsers
This site should work well and look good in all modern browsers and backwards through most older browsers still in use. However, because we had already taken far longer than we wanted on getting this new design up, there is one glaring exception to that claim: if you are among the roughly 6% of Suss readers still using Internet Explorer 6, we feel for you but will be serving you the Universal IE6 Stylesheet developed by Andy Clarke. You will still have full access to all the site’s content; there simply won’t be any fancy bits for you to play with or pretty layouts at which to marvel. This will likely change in the future, once we have enough time on our hands (and applicable tools in our belt) to tackle the many IE6 bugs. We dislike leaving people behind, understand most people still using IE6 are doing so not of their own choice, and hope to one day soon allow everyone who visits the site the same experience.
The Geeky Bits
The initial design was roughed out in Adobe Photoshop and Fireworks CS4 using a 960 pixel grid (60 pixel columns + 20 pixel gutters) with a 24 pixel baseline. The XHTML, CSS, and jQuery were handwritten in Coda on a Mac in a home office rapidly being transformed into a nursery. The sweatpants are gray, the stubble is week-old or better, and the coffee is New Harvest’s delicious Kilimanjaro Blend.
