We spent some time over the past few days modifying and adding stuff to the *Junkies websites (DotNetJunkies.com and SqlJunkies.com). Among the changes are:
- Relative font-sizing for UI accessibility - we had explicit and unchangable font sizes before.
- RSS Feeds for Latest Articles, Upcoming Events and Latest News
- Rearranged the home page to hopefully be more readable - hopefully it will encourage people to click on more links.
We also built PageHeader and PageFooter controls. Each has a ShowSidebars property that when set to true:
- The PageHeader control creates a page-wide table with the header and navigation information. The navigation is read from the PageLayoutData.xml file, so modifying navigation is as easy as changing an XML file.
- The PageHeader opens a table and creates a LeftSidebar colum, and openes the center content colum
- The PageFooter closes the center content column and adds a RightSidebar column.
- The PageFooter adds a bottom table with the copyright information (read from the PageLayoutData.xml file).
Additionally, you can use the control separately by setting the ShowSidebars to false - this will render only the top or bottom table depending on which control you are using. And even more, you can set ShowSidebars to True, but hide one or both sidebars by setting the PageHeader.ShowLeftSidebar property to false, and the PageFooter.ShowRightSidebar to false. All in all its pretty flexible and we are using it site wide on both sites.