I've spent some time over this weekend playing with rationalising the site layout in terms of html and css. I've struggled a bit with it, but after some work I've separated out the relevant parts and put together a nice template. (you know, instead of actually working on the cms).

I put together two designs: one that looks very similar to the sketch I put together, and one that looks very similar to Subtraction.com. Of course, I'll be using the second one. Here's a look at it when it's running without the menu bar on the side. It's even valid XHTML 1.1 Strict!

I really do like that image I use at the top. Took it myself, ya know...

The first layout is crap. The second benefits from the crap in the first one. For instance, I finally read up on the visual formatting model for CSS, and used the first one go to play with that. When the time came to the second one, I had a much better idea what i was doing. I also determined the correct separation of content, layout, and CSS that I want to use, and defined 5 content regions that form the page, which are substituted into the template. They are: site navigation, page navigation, site menu, page menu, and finally page content (the real meat). This actually help with designing the CMS itself, as it shows that there are a few (more) things that need to be taken into consideration. For instance, page navigation can occur in multiple places. If you have fancy javascript (or whatever) for the navigation, then you need to make sure that your code can generate something that the browser will like having two of.

Anyway, enough playing for today.