I really enjoy test driven development where I create tests for my
objects and how they should work and then write the code to implement
the objects. Using
NUNIT, I have a very good testing framework that
ensures that if I do change the code it won’t break what’s working
previously. Say I want to rewrite portions of the code to improve the
speed after the site has been up for a few months. With a previously
passing NUNIT test on the objects, I can refactor the code with
confidence in that it will work exactly as it did when I went into
production but with improvements.
Moving from ASP to .NET will increase the speed of the site because
.NET works off compiled code for the most part. Like anything you can
bloat your code enough to make the site slower than a scripted ASP
page. Nevertheless, moving to .NET also made it easier to code and
debug. And when I decide to add enhancements to the site, working with
an object oriented model will make inputting enhancements easier and
quicker.
You can see the difference between the old design and color
scheme compared to the new one we have now. One thing I’m very proud of
is the fact that we don’t have any ads on the site. Therefore, I didn’t
take into consideration of any ad placement areas. The site and the
bandwidth are paid out of our own pockets and we’re going to keep it
that way as long as possible. It’s been like that for eight years
through various incarnations of this site and I think we’ll stay that
way for a very long time. Besides, if I put ads on Gaming Nexus, I’d
probably block it out myself with Firefox’s adblock extension.
Our old site design relied heavily on tables to create the
layout. Tables, while easy to create, are slow and need to be rendered
completely before anything shows up on your browser. So for modem
users, it would take a while to load up and you will only see blank
squares until the tables were rendered. The new approach was to make it
a table-less design completely using DIVS and SPANS. Take a look at the
source code. You won’t see one single table in there in the main
content area. There might be tables from some of the open source
objects I’ve used but for the most part, the main parts of the site are
all DIV and SPAN tags. To get the site to layout correctly, we rely
heavily on CSS. Sites like ESPN, MSN, and others have moved to this
approach and you can get a great feel of how powerful this can be if
you visit
CSS ZEN Garden. Besides the increase in speed, less bandwidth
is used as CSS is cached on your machine and there’s less code to
create a page without a table. And if I decide to make a design change,
all I would need is to fiddle with the CSS. No longer will I have to
mess with tables with nested tables or row spans or column spans.
Tables are still useful for showing tabular data and we still use
tables for the article search results since the DataGrid control we use
in .NET renders out the data in a table but for a site layout, I think
this approach is much more extensible and robust.
There are a few other areas where we rely on CSS to do our
work. Looking at the borders around the news items and the article, you
can see two rounded corners on opposite corners of some text areas.
Normally, this is done by cutting out a rounded corner in Photoshop and
then stuck on the corners of the text area. What may surprise you
though is the rounded corners are done without any images and done with
just a javascript file and CSS. I picked up this cool little code from
Nifty Corners.
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