Kal Zone

About this site

The main goal here is to provide a downloadable repository of content that people might be interested in.

The design of this site is minimalist. No fancy navigation menus, no sidebars, no dedicated site search. To find stuff, you essentially have to drill down from the top page — unless, as is often the case, you have done a Google search, or have gotten a link by email from me. Site navigation links are found on the home page, and on topic pages. All navigation is downward, except in the top bar, where you can pop back up one level, or back up to the home page.

The site is organized as a simple hierarchy, mostly only three deep, so the user can always pop up to the parent level or the home page by following the links in the top bar. Page layouts are linear. A secondary goal is to have it display reasonably well on smartphones.

The simplified navigation also makes the site much easier to maintain. Each node in the hierarchy has only one downward-pointing menu, which is the only place that needs to be edited to add or reorder items.

I have tried to establish a consistent visual language using highlighted areas (pure white against the warm gray background) for items that need to be emphasized, and square 96 x 96 photo icons, which almost always link to something, either a child page, or a Lightbox slide show, or an external site such as Soundcloud or Flickr.

Beyond basic HTML and CSS, the site uses Lokesh Dhakar's JavaScript/jQuery/CSS script Lightbox 2 for slideshows. The site is hosted on Bluehost.

The original implementation of this site was in Drupal, a PHP application, with a MySQL database back end. At times, I found myself doing Drupal updates more often than content updates, so I decided to simplify. The present version is static HTML, edited by hand (assisted by BBEdit) and uploaded manually to the server. Content updates are just as easy, and there are fewer worries about site security.

Copyright © Kalle Nemvalts except as noted. Original content on this site is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License. The Creative Commons license does not cover commercial reuse or adaptation, which must be negotiated separately.