As you can see, my website has had a make-over! I'm not a programmer by any stretch, so coming up with a new look has taken a lot of trial and error. This new layout is phase one of my redesign. I'm still playing around with adding new widgets, but so far I like the new look. (Hopefully it's all lining up and working properly on other browsers!)
There's a site I love for quickly designing tiled backgrounds: BGPatterns.com It's where I made this lovely blue background, and the darker background I had before. Even if you aren't working on a project that needs a background, it's just really fun to play around with this little tool!
The three column layout and floating header took up most of my time - so many little tweaks to make everything line up just right! (At least when you don't know what you are doing.) Whenever I work on a project like this, I realize just how much I admire the skill of real web designers.
Back in my sys admin days, I could turn out highly functional scripts to automate processes or parse large quantities of data, but there would always be some higher-up who wanted to see the output on a webpage. No problem-- except the output would be a very, very simple table or list on a plain background (plain and ugly, but functional!). Apparently the output isn't all that impressive unless it's on a flashy website, except to the sys admins like me who were actually using the scripts to simplify their own work.
The fun of playing with the design of this site, is that I can get by with minimal html and css skills. Just save a backup of the working template and tinker away until I figure out which bit of code makes something happen. Of course that kind of line-by-line guessing and testing takes up way too much time, making me wish (again) that there were a few more hours in each day!
1 comments: