bring back softimage.net

[Yanik]

You should not generate HTML and CSS via Fireworks or any other image editing tool. It won't be clean and will be annoying to maintain or edit, especially if you have data coming from a database.
You also shouldn't use png's unless it's really necessary. Almost 90% can be done using CSS. Modern browsers support the "border-radius" attribute to fillet the edges of the containers.

50% of the layout can quickly be made using a grid generator.
Check out this example. Basically the layout I made consists of the 940px width element and the 220px and 700px elements. Press the download button to get the generated CSS files.
With just a few lines of CSS you have set up the layout, without using old techniques such as tables.

The "background-color" I used is #f5f5f5 for the filter, tag and sortbar background. The font I used is called Open Sans and is a free to use webfont.
You can download the fonts and the CSS for it at fontsquirrel.

The spotlight and compound results use gradients, you could do it via CSS or just slice a part of it as a JPG/PNG and use it as a background. I'd do it via a black transparent png which goes from 0% opacity to something like 2-5% opacity. The only other images you need are for the logo and the icons. This way your site will be very quick to load and not generate much traffic.

The category option filters tree CSS should be done by hand.

[Tekano]

splendid, well I finally got working the Python 2.7 & Google App Engine 'helloworld' example served locally over the weekend and even managed to deploy a test app from the tutorial guestbook - http://sicompoundtest.appspot.com/ also installed django , its working correctly inside of python, lots of 'gotchas' like can't even use notepad as it doesnt save the formatting corrrectly for a python file. didnt realise that Python is sooo sensitive to spaces and hard returns. I get pages of errors beause an 'enter' is not in the right place. Vaguely remembered Kim Aldis recommending 'Vim' several years ago so using that now with a python filter (windows simple version of course!) so whilst in the scheme of things thats not very much progress in the eyes of a web developer - for me its a massive step forward in a direction I really did not want to be going in, but feel its necessary to get this done in a reasonable amount of time

Also, Yanik thats awesome about the grids - really didnt want to be messing around with tables and dividers and a million png images like 10 years ago

simpler the better! will try out some grids and css combos served from GAE & Python next then

Cheers

Rob

[Yanik]

You shouldn't use notepad or simple texteditors when you can save a lot of time when using an IDE instead. It will fix the tabs/spaces issue for you and automatically indent copy/paste scripts.
PyCharm is as far as I know the best Python IDE when it comes to Django and GAE. Also for normal python usage it's really great. Just type the name of a class and it will ask it to import it for you and show it's member functions and variables. I don't even care where to import stuff from since the IDE does it automatically for me. Try it out, your python development will go a lot faster.

[Letterbox]

are we there yet?

[Tekano]

unfortunately nowhere near as my devs are on holiday right now its kind of chicken and egg as I need to know what is possible to achieve with them before I start to plan the site out. they are back on 16th September.

[Hirazi Blue]

Any news/update on this?

edit: 18-12-2012 - Thanks for your reply...