Sogeti Phoenix Blogs

I gave a presentation last night on the topic of improving web design for developers. On the topic of CSS I gave a very simple demonstration on using a non-table based layout. It went well over all, but I didn't have a ton of time to get it perfect and resulted with this.

It works, but wasn't the best I could do (the right column noticeably doesn't extend to the bottom of the content). Christian asked a great question about this, but my brain froze and I wasn't able to come up with a quality answer. Of course this one detail plagued me through the night.

Well, the answer is very simple. Wrap the two columns in a container element (another <div> in this case). Set the overflow property to auto or hidden, adjust the width, accounting for padding, and use the same background color as the sidebar. And presto, you get what I meant to do.

If you'd like to see the markup and style, just view the source of the page.

We've recently updated the theme of our site! Originally it was using the default "Standard" theme included with BlogEngine.Net. As with most default things, it needed a significant facelift. After poking around the other themes included with the distribution, I saw that Terrafirma had similar colors to ours.

I did a little tweaking with the fonts and made some fixes regarding dates, and arrived at what you see now. The only thing missing was a fancy header logo. As luck would have it, I came across a fantastic resource of free blog headers at smashingmagazine.com. Again, I picked one of the headers that matched the colors we have, and added some Sogeti branding.

All in all, I'm very pleased with the end result. I know that there are still display issues with IE 6, but for all other modern browsers, it looks pretty good. If you do find an issue, please either add a comment here or send us an email.