This morning at 6:30am we launched the latest flavor of HGTV.com, internally referenced as HG-Lite. Technically we had been working on it up until a week ago, and finished the final prep work at 11pm last night.
It was fascinating to sit in on the conference calls between New Yor, our other office in Knoxville, TN. and a system guru from Minnesota. All of these pieces, strung across the country, able to work together seamlessly thanks to the internet. Being Front End, I know very little about the stuff that happens server side, although I’m admittedly fascinated by it. Caches were flushed, CDN’s were notified, and hundreds of file exchanges took place all so we could bring you something new at dawn today.
Although not a complete design refresh, we introduced completely rewritten headers and footers, brought to life by yours truly. Working without a DOCTYPE (because the current system can’t output one), and without my trusty reset.css (because it has to play nice with hundreds of older existing content) was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. I wrote about some of these quirks as I encountered them, and learned more about Quirksmode than I ever expected to know. You might recognize the demo images now.
The header features an almost JavaScript-free dropdown menu called “Son of Suckerfish,” which utilizes CSS and absolute positioning based on the :hover pseudo class to hide and reveal the menus. I say almost because as you probably know, IE6 doesn’t support :hover on anything other than an anchor, and we were using the list item. With a couple lines of JS, IE6 users get an extra class on hover, making it “hookable.”
This was my first major launch while with Scripps Networks, and it was a complete roller-coaster. I’d be totally rude if I didn’t thank the amazing people that worked on this with me including the designer team, Sam, Scott, and my boss, Jay.
So, what are you waiting for? Head of to HGTV.com and check out the face lift. We are of course continuing to develop and polish the site, so expect more posts of this type.
For now, I’m exhausted. I’m going to reply to some emails, and then crawl into bed for some much needed rest. Hang tough out there.
Leave a Reply