I’ve had my new site design up for a month or so now. Since no one else has complimented me on my excellent design skills, I decided to do it myself.
“Rundy, your new design looks very professional. I like your layout.”
Actually, I call it new design but it is really the first complete design. For nearly the first year this place had only the rudiments of layout and navigation. This was a source of never-ending embarrassment for me. To imagine people coming to my site and thinking the crude organization was something I actually thought was design . . . it was enough to make me want to hide my head in shame.
Having this site marked up in a halfway decent manner removed one irritant. Creating an about page eliminated a second irritant. It bothered me to no end thinking that someone might come to this site and wonder “Why the name Silverware Thief?” and they would have no place to find the answer. Thus the much needed about page, though I managed to create the link incorrectly so clicking on it anyplace but from the main page will give you a 404 error. Argh, a new irritation. I need to fix that and some other minor site problems, but otherwise I’m pretty happy with how things came out.
Putting together the design for this site was fun. I didn’t do it when I first made this blog (or the months afterward) because of a lack of time, not a lack of desire. When I first put this site up I had to learn a bit about Cascading Style Sheets to modify the original template. Actually redesigning the site to how I wanted it to look required learning much more CSS.
Of course, I learned in classic Rundy style. I tried to figure out things by experimentation and mistakes, eventually being driven to the W3C’s documentation on CSS. Until that point I managed to get myself utterly flummoxed on matters of positioning. The various web browsers I was testing my design on would not all display my layout in the same manner. In my usual fashion I suspected some type of conspiracy, which was partly true. On reading some relevant sections of the W3C documentation on CSS I realized my attempted layout was not the right way to go about things . . . but some of my problems were also caused by certain browsers assuming certain things.
Drop dead, Internet Explorer.
But, after a good deal of head scratching, some reading, and a very lot of experimentation I managed to learn enough to figure out a layout method that worked in all major browsers. Well, for right now. No bets on what developer might break something in future browser releases. For the present it looks good, I think, and it makes me feel tech-savvy when I consider that I did it all without using tables for layout. (I am so easily pleased.)
Learning CSS was an eye-opening experience, and in truth I learned so little of what CSS can do. Compared to messing with table layout, CSS positioning is a breeze. At first it felt obtuse but after getting the hang of it I realize CSS brings sanity to document layout on the web. By using CSS a web designer can work more like he would in traditional print material.
Once I got the hang of working with CSS I couldn’t imagine wanting to go back to wrestling with tables to position my design elements. Table layout is messy and confusing when compared to CSS, once you understand the modulated nature of CSS. The design of this site only served to confirm my thoughts that CSS was the way to go for better and simpler site design.
I like the creative process of site design, and I like learning new things.
Unfortunately, I do web design so erratically I will probably forget half of the useful things I learned designing this site and have to learn them all over again next time. That is a problem with being a hobbyist web designer.
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