Neal Grosskopf Dot Com A NG Designs Site

Emily and I found out today that the people we are buying our house from would like to move the closing date to August 15th, down from August 25th. They now plan to be out of our house on August 6th (which is coming up really fast.) Not wanting to wait any longer than we have to, we accepted their proposal to move the closing date. What this means is that we will be living in our new house in about a month from now! Unfortunately with that comes packing... I have already started packing some things up tonight. I will probably start packing more stuff as the day progress. Currently I don't have a great deal of boxes but I am scouring the cardboard dumpster outside our apartment every so often for more boxes. We have yet to score a mortgage but we have an appointment scheduled for next Monday with a banker to finalize that. We're almost there!

My car (formally Emily's car) is in dire need of attention. The tires are really, really old, the steering wheel shakes when I drive it and the breaks are starting to squeal. I finally got off my procrastinating butt (which only seems to happen with car problems) and made an appointment at Fleet Farm for this weekend. I have so much stuff that needs to be done that they'll need to keep it for the entire day...lol.

In NG Designs news I am close to wrapping up a deal with another client which entails designing a second website for them. The previous website I did for them - Ultimart Convenience Stores - was finished in April. At the time it was one of the more challenging designs I've converted to HTML, but my latest incarnation of NealGrosskopf.com has now surpassed that.

Also Emily and I have decided to get a dog (pronounced pupppppppy if you're talking to Emily) It will be a Golden Retriever which we're getting from some people in Watertown, WI. I'm still not really hot on the idea of having a dog simply because they are more work than cats, but I'm Emily will be more than happy to take upon all the responsibilities of being a dog owner.

For the 4th of July I went up to Eagle River with my family. It was a pretty good time despite Emily not being there. I posted some great pictures in my Wallpapers section so go and check those out, and maybe download a few of them.

Our department at work is moving to a new building. We've known about this for quite some time now but it has finally happened. It hasn't been too big of a deal for me since I've only been there since November and I don't have a lot of stuff to move (I only had 2 boxes compared to some people who have dozens).

Today was finally showtime, our department packed everything up and we (i.e myself and another guy) moved all our junk to the new building. It's been quite some time since I've done any "real work" i.e coming home from work with a sore back. In fact the last time I had a lousy job like that was when I worked at Piggly Wiggly for 5 years.

I think sometimes myself and probably other people under-appreciate our cushy jobs and coming home with a good feeling back rather than a sore one. It's nice to do a little real work every now and then to remind yourself that your job and work environment isn't all that bad.

It was also strange, because as I was wheeling boxes through our office with another guy, a lot of people would give me strange looks like "why is that office guy doing real work?" Almost like I should have more dignity than to lower myself to labor intensive work. I guess I just needed a reminder that I have a good job.

In other news Emily and I did our house inspection this weekend. It went well and there are no major problems with our house. We are both really excited to move in August 25th and can't wait (although I'm not all that excited about packing up our junk.)

I've been busy at home the past week with computer hardware related problems. I got a hardrive from my brother in law so not wanting it to go to waste, I've been trying my best to triple boot Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Kubuntu Linux. After turning our extra bedroom into a computer wasteland, I've finally found the right combination (I hope). In geek speak, I had to slipstream XP and SP2 together since my main PC has PCI express, and XP default won't work on PCI express without SP2 installed with it. I may write up an article on how I accomplished all of this in geek speak.

Fin.

Well it's been almost two weeks now since I redesigned my website. I must say that redesigning it has been a positive experience so far. My site traffic has increased 109% percent since the redesign thanks in part to several CSS design galleries picking up my website and posting it. I submitted my site to numerous gallery sites and almost gave up. Then last Sunday I submitted it to a few more and all of them added me on Monday. I'm so proud. I also smashed a new site visits record Monday hitting 150 visits in a single day! I followed that up yesterday with 107 visits which makes it the first time I've ever hit 100 visits two days in a row.

In house news, we have a home inspection set up for Saturday, June 28th. It sounds like our house wasn't flooded at all and survived the Oshkosh flood fine. Once we get the house inspected we will probably lock in a mortgage in early July. Then it's two more months until we move in officially! (Which is at the end of August). It's so exciting!

In work news I've been super busy. It's a good thing I got my website redesigned when I did because I have no more "mental bandwidth" when I get home (to quote Jason Irish). Most the things I am working on right now aren't going to end anytime soon so this will likely be a reoccurring theme throughout the summer for me.

What a day it was. At work we had to go down in our basement from 4:30 - 5:15 due to a tornado warning. There was hail and sideways rain. Then on the way home I could barely see anything.

Once in Oshkosh it got much worse. The entire stretch of South Park and 20th were flooded. Every intersection had at least a half a foot to a foot of water. My small cavalier was struggling to make it through it. See my photo gallery for a few photos of the chaos.

Once I arrived to 24th and Main (near Arty and Ed's) the water became too deep for my car and I had to back up. At this point I felt I might be stranded here because cars my size were literally stopped in the flooded water. After waiting there for 15 minutes I became restless and headed for higher grounds on Oregon Street to take the long route home. This road was ok but once again became flooded about a mile in.

On a good note I had one of my photos shown on WBAY Channel 2. On a bad note, I'm wondering if I'll be able to make it to work tomorrow of if work is even above water right now.

Well, It's official. I've launched my new website today. NealGrosskopf.com Version 3. I started my website back in October of 2005 basically as a means to test out new web design techniques and to become a better coder. Over those 3 years I've become a much better designer and coder. I'll have to give a big thanks to Jason and Chris for nudging me to create NealGrosskopf.com back then. I wouldn't be where I am right now if I hadn't created this website.

So why did I redesign? I was growing a bit tired of the old design and my biggest pet peeve was that I lazily coded it for HTML Transitional and not HTML Strict. (A relic from Version 1 which originally didn't have a DOCTYPE at all but I added one in half way as Transitional)

Another problem I had with my old site was the home page. It felt very long and cluttered with junk. With the new design I've hid most of that clutter in the new "Actions" flyout. Simply hover over the "Actions" link and you will see all of the family clutter from before.

The biggest thing with this redesign is usability. You will find little things here and there that I added because of usability. All the section now have links on the thread title (i.e the blog title is now clickable)

Also I've added a toolbar at the top of the site which really contains the same content as the right navigation. I believe that my toolbar is probably the only one of it's kind on the internet right now. I've been to all the trendy sites and I haven't seen a single one that uses a pop down as a toolbar. The pop down idea has already been done before but usually only for jump/skip links (which is useless if you ask me)

With a new site comes some drawbacks as well. My site requirements have increased a lot. I no longer support 800x600. I have put in some measures so it at least renders properly in 800x600 but you will get some nice horizontal scrollbars. Also the site will require a standards compliant browser. It will degrade gracefully in older browsers but you're basically going to need to be using IE7, Firefox 2, Opera 9 or Safari 3 on it. IE6 does work but there are a few bells and whistles that won't quite look the same. I also haven't tested it in IE6 since I completed the shell/template.

Also the site is a bit heavier than previous ones. This is due to me creating such a complex design but being limited to the current tools available to reach that design (CSS) The other reason is due to the large background image that I incorporated which is the heart and sole of the design.

If you like my new design there are a few inspirational websites I used as a baseline. I'll let you determine what sites those are...

There still are many things I need to do before I can call the redesign complete, but like the past redesigns, I got so anxious that I just threw it up tonight. If you run into any problems please let me know. There are bound to be a few 404 pages or 500 errors around.