By Dave Taylor
Expert Author
Article Date: 2008-09-15
I saw that on the anniversary of 9/11 you changed your Web site home page to have a thick black border and some commemorative words. Nice, low key, and still effective. How'd ya do it?
Dave's Answer:Glad you noticed. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to commemorate the tragedy of September 11th, 2001, and the loss of life both on that day and subsequently in the Middle East as a direct result of the attack. A graphic seemed too subtle. A blog entry seemed like an awkward fit on a tech Q&A blog, and replacing the site with a one-page commemorative seemed a bit too over the top for me. So a black edge seemed like a good middle ground.
To accomplish that, I made a surprisingly simple tweak to the HTML template that's used to build the home page for the Ask Dave Taylor site. Most weblogs have template-based site design -- which is one of the great benefits of using a weblog tool as the foundation for a web site, of course -- so it's pretty straightforward.
In the "index.html" template I found the following lines:
<body style='background-color:#ffc;background-image: url(/Graphics/pinstripebg.gif);' >
<div style="font-size:75%;font-weight:bold;color:#555;text-align:right;">You're finding <strong>free tech support</strong> at AskDaveTaylor.com</div>
and changed them thusly (additions and changes are in bold):
<body style='background-color:#ffc;background-image: url(/Graphics/pinstripebg.gif);
border:20px solid #111;margin:1px; padding:5px;'>
<div style="font-size:75%;font-weight:bold;color:#555;text-align:right;">
The black border is in memory of those people who died in 9/11 and subsequently in the war in Iraq</div>
The results were a page that looked like this:
I think it was just the right balance between being consistent with the theme of this site and honoring the people who have died. I hope you agree.
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