Development Blog Update

Since starting work on this blog yesterday I have been messing around with the skinning options and additional gadgets that could be included in the page, with the intent of providing useful functionality to our users (including post archives, a link to HelloTurtle itself, and a search field to search this blog and any site we link to within the blog), and a visual appearance that is similar to our main site.


As with all template based sites, the hardest part of re-skinning a site is try to work around the limitations of the CMS and the template you start with. I decided to choose a simple template to work with in the hope that it would be fairly easy to play with the template outside of the established limits of the content pane. My original intention was to have the hello turtle logo in the top left (and possibly top right) of the page, however the CMS (and the page template) wanted none of this and refused to display the logo anywhere (except when I moved it within the content pane, which was not where I wanted the logo to be displayed).

Eventually I gave up with that element of the design plan, and asked our graphic designer to create a title banner for the blog in place of the title text. In retrospect, it would have been much easier if I'd just started with a decent title banner.
The majority of the time that I spent working on the blog re-skin (when not attempting to insert logos), was spent working on the background colours with the intention of choosing colours that would match the colours used on the main site in order to help the two sites appear visually similar.

Up to this point the blog did not actually have a link back to HelloTurtle, so I threw together a quick link (including turtle logo) to sit at the top of the right hand menu column so it would be easily noticed. Also included in the menu column was the search bar, and a list of archived posts (archived by week) both of which will come in more useful further down the line when there are a lot more posts on the blog.