Minute44 - Dan Schonhaar

Over the past couple of days I’ve been playing around adding new content to the footer section of the site. I believe these changes are for the better and give you a better insight into my interests. They also gave some of my HTML and CSS skills a test.

Firstly I’ve added a “Recent Reads” section showing the last three books I read with links to amazon.co.uk reviews. That way, you can see what other people have said and even buy the book for yourself if you want. In addition to this I have altered my recently seen movies area to only contain the last three movies I saw. Rather than keep the existing text link style, however, I’ve opted for showing you a thumbnail of the movie’s poster with the rating I gave it underneath. Clicking these thumbnails will take you to either my own review of that movie or another site with an external review. These are more long-winded to create but I think it gives a much nicer look. Lastly I’ve added an “Interesting News” area with text links to three news stories that grabbed my attention along with the date they were posted.

It was fairly tricky to fit all this in so that it wouldn’t all break up if the user had a low resolution or increased the text size. I’ve made it so that it looks it’s best on resolutions of 1024×768 or higher, but all the information will still be perfectly legible at 800×600 and you may only notice some minor breaks at resolutions lower than that. Believe it or not, I have tested the site on a mobile browser (My Nokia N80) and not only could I read it all, the LightBox plugin still worked!

I hope you like these changes, please, feel free to leave me some comments with ideas on how the footer, or any other area, could be further improved. I’ll take all suggestions on board.