After two-and-a-half weeks of testing various layouts, fonts and colors, the new version was released at 12:42 p.m. on Thursday, February 17, 2005. Not much was changed; in short, if it wasn’t broken, it didn’t get fixed.

  1. Style sheets were revised; navigation styling was simplified.
  2. Sectional links on the navigation bar were made easier to understand. For example, the link to the food section now reads, “Food (Ummy’s Nummies)” instead of just “Ummy’s Nummies”.
  3. The trusty old Times font (Times New Roman on Windows) was chosen for normal text; it was the only one which proved easy to read and rendered well with all of our curly quotes and other special characters as well as bold and italic text and superscripts. See Funeral Message for Illa Petitt for a good example. Most people have this font or a similar serif font.
  4. The Verdana font was chosen for headings; the Arial font previously in use rendered the name “Illa” as three sticks followed by a small “a,” because the uppercase I and lowercase L are identical in that font. Most people have Verdana or a similar sans-serif font; a font-size-adjust rule is added to the styling in case the default sans-serif is larger or smaller than Verdana.
  5. A little of the PHP scripting on the server was simplified for easier maintenance.
  6. A few pages and some styles were tweaked over the next day or two, so they worked properly in the new version.

On February 21, the main style sheet was re-done in PHP so that certain browsers (Internet Explorer 5.0 for Windows, and Opera 7) will receive “tweaked” editions of them automatically. The next day, a new PHP style sheet was developed for version 4 browsers. Now everyone will receive one (and only one) style sheet; separate screen and print styles are incorporated into the main style sheet.

Minor content updates were made to a few pages to reflect changes in the new version, on February 23.

New background colors were introduced for each section on February 26. Lemon Chiffon was chosen for the navigation bar. Umm’s Colors was then updated with the new colors.