WEB DESIGN BLOG

Even though being in the computer industry for many years, I had never delved into web design. I had a general idea how HTML worked, but had never actually written anything. My start came when my wife started her photography business and needed a web site. Since I am the "computer guy" of the household, it was up to me to figure out how to do this. I picked up a copy of "HTML for Dummies", pulled up Notepad and started to work. The end result was a horrid-looking (by today's standards) site for my wife's business.

My "modern era" of web design started when my wife needed a site upgrade. I was aware of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and what they do, and decided that I needed to learn this in order to get a site done properly. I found W3School's CSS Tutorial, spent a couple of hours learning the basics and got to work. I didn't want frames on this site, and needed a way to make the menus consistant between pages. I'm very fluent in PERL and was aware of how PERL CGI could help me automate my pages. For some reason, I thought that my wife's Yahoo! web hosting plan didn't include PERL CGI (I thought we had to upgrade to the next package), so I ended up writing a PERL script on my computer's Linux partition that would generate the many pages of my wife's image galleries. All other pages still had to be fixed by hand whenever she needs a menu item change. I also learned a bit of JavaScript to add the image rollovers for the galleries.

My next project came when one of my wife's photography acquaintences, John Alexander, liked her website and called her up to ask her who created it. I always want her to say "I sleep with this guy who does it for me for free." Anyone knowing my wife knows that she would never say that. John ended up asking me to build his site, and I accepted. This being my first paying job, I charged an extremely small amount. For this project, I decided to do a little scripting. I learned PHP and started building his site. THIS is the end result.

One of my current projects is for Troy O'Connor. Troy just opened a martial arts and fitness gym. I'm building his website. Even though it is online, it still has some work to do. It can be seen HERE. My main new feature is that the customer can edit the site themselves. After the user logs in, he is able to edit any page and create new pages using the Whizzywig editor. It also makes use of the HIOX Events Calendar to schedule events. This is also my first site that makes use of AnyLink CSS JavaScript pulldown menus.

One of the biggest things about me is that I don't like pre-fab sites. I don't like site-builder tools that comes with hosting companies. I don't like FrontPage or DreamWeaver, or anything else that generates HTML. I don't mind editing content with HTML editors (in fact, I'm using one right now ), but don't like designing the structure of a site. Call me a web-snob, but I like designing sites from scratch using only a text-editor and Photoshop. I do make use of JavaScript and PHP modules available on script sites, but usually I like heavily modifying them to fit my needs. I feel that anything that is plug-and-play, never exactly fits my needs.