Since 2005, I’ve been hosting an online Internet radio show called “Radio X”. I feel weird promoting the show here, in part because I never really felt right shilling a product on this site when this was about our writings, our specific thoughts on things, and so on.

But I did mention in the past when I came up with a new layout, or if someone new came on the show, or if we did new things on the program we haven’t done before. And this isn’t an exception. In fact, I am incredibly happy about the new developments I just can’t NOT share them with everyone!

The first is that the Radio X show’s website has a new look. Not only that, but after years of designing table-based layouts and design, I finally broke down and put the whole thing together using pure CSS coding.

I know, that’s so 2004, but whatever. I would never have felt right if I didn’t do something the way I felt comfortable with, and this is something I felt comfortable with after tinkering with CSS on a couple of other websites, doing some research, and then asking advice from Whitters.

For my first attempt, I think it came out pretty good. The hardest part was understanding the dynamic on how to center the whole thing without losing the effect on Firefox, Safari, Explorer, and Opera. I am all about making sure everyone sees as close to the same thing as possible, and since Explorer has it’s own way to center CSS coding than other browsers, the challenge was there and was actually a lot simpler than I thought it would be.

The second development I am excited about is that after over two years of toying with the idea of it, I finally opened up a shop for the show.

T-shirts, hats, calendars, all with a new logo I finally decided to settle on! I know it sounds stupid, but I’m really excited over this.

The show itself has been exciting lately. With active phone calls, it has definitely grown from what it used to be like. It was time for the website to grow with the show.

The best part was that it was a LOT easier than I ever expected it to be. In fact, the hardest part of designing the new layout was preparing the graphics and coming up with the content bar. Though it took most of the weekend start-to-finish to do, the actual work time on the design was maybe a total of three hours.

In fact, that’s really the part of the whole process I was dreading most: the time factor.

It always starts with a sketch. From layout out the design to coming up with specs, adding notes and calculating pixel spaces, the actual coding for this page actually looks a lot like the initial draft. That NEVER happens.

Something that usually happens that didn’t happen this time: revisions. From start to finish, this is what I wanted the site to look like. Other than minor tweaking I haven’t finished yet, like adding the show’s affiliates, this is it. The cut pages are exactly has I envisioned them, the main page is what I want, and everything is as I first envisioned it. There are no major tweaks, changes, or mutations from what I first came up with to the live design.

Now if I can only come up with something for this site, I’ll be excited. However, seeing as how easy this was to do, you never know!