I've been so head-down busy since I posted this check-in that I've only just found the time to reply to it myself 😅 But I did have some stuff to share, so by Jove, I'll share it!
Last weekend I found the time to work on one of my main goals for the challenge, which was to improve my fic page (and also meta page, since I realised the same principles apply) styling. I created a dedicated fic page stylesheet with bigger margins for readability, and then I played around with some other aspects, like a slightly less bright white background and a slightly less stark black font colour to make it easier on the eyes. I used the WebAIM contrast checker to make sure that the new combination was still accessible.
I also looked at fic pages whose readability I like and figured out what they do that I wasn't doing, like bigger paragraph and line spacing, and then I added that. I toyed with making my headers a different font instead of Verdana, but then settled on a slightly closer letter spacing instead. (I love that all of that type of customisation is possible ^^) It's still a work in progress, so I can always improve on it later, but I like it much better now. You can see what the pages used to look like from this Wayback Machine capture of my first fanfic, versus the live version.
I applied the new stylesheet to all of my fic pages and then realised I should also add it to my pages for longer meta essays. In the process, I also realised that my imagery for my Harvard/Aiden meta essay was not mobile friendly at all, so I spent some time making it responsive for small screens, setting up a max width and adding a link to the image to view it in full (mainly beneficial for desktop, since on mobile the image is displaying as large as it can for the screen anyway). At the moment these don't open as overlays, so it's a separate page that you have to navigate back from - later I'll try and figure out how to do the overlay thing. I've found coding image stuff to be a bit of a pain because searching it turns up a billion and one WordPress plugins rather than what I actually want to do >.> (Also, figuring out the right vocabulary can be a challenge).
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carisma_sensei
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Date: 2024-09-22 11:02 am (UTC)Last weekend I found the time to work on one of my main goals for the challenge, which was to improve my fic page (and also meta page, since I realised the same principles apply) styling. I created a dedicated fic page stylesheet with bigger margins for readability, and then I played around with some other aspects, like a slightly less bright white background and a slightly less stark black font colour to make it easier on the eyes. I used the WebAIM contrast checker to make sure that the new combination was still accessible.
I also looked at fic pages whose readability I like and figured out what they do that I wasn't doing, like bigger paragraph and line spacing, and then I added that. I toyed with making my headers a different font instead of Verdana, but then settled on a slightly closer letter spacing instead. (I love that all of that type of customisation is possible ^^) It's still a work in progress, so I can always improve on it later, but I like it much better now. You can see what the pages used to look like from this Wayback Machine capture of my first fanfic, versus the live version.
I applied the new stylesheet to all of my fic pages and then realised I should also add it to my pages for longer meta essays. In the process, I also realised that my imagery for my Harvard/Aiden meta essay was not mobile friendly at all, so I spent some time making it responsive for small screens, setting up a max width and adding a link to the image to view it in full (mainly beneficial for desktop, since on mobile the image is displaying as large as it can for the screen anyway). At the moment these don't open as overlays, so it's a separate page that you have to navigate back from - later I'll try and figure out how to do the overlay thing. I've found coding image stuff to be a bit of a pain because searching it turns up a billion and one WordPress plugins rather than what I actually want to do >.> (Also, figuring out the right vocabulary can be a challenge).