Web Design and Cascading Style Sheets
I spent around a dozen hours this week coding a website; it was the first moderately complex site in years that I’ve done entirely by hand.
My wife is the best graphic designer in Denver, so she sometimes ends up with more work than she can handle, and a number of her customers need the sites to be both designed and programmed. I’ve been taking over the programming to increase our turnaround time and let her focus on doing what she enjoys.
I started coding websites in the mid-90s, back when they were just made with HTML and looked absolutely horrible by today’s standards. Things have come a long way since then! While we have the full Adobe Master Suite (though we haven’t come up with the money for CS5 yet), I decided to code this one by hand for two reasons: I wanted to use HTML5, and I think it’s easier to just do the CSS by hand instead of messing with an interface. That could change as I become more familiar with Dreamweaver, but really: CSS is just so simple! The main problem with it is that you don’t get an error message when you screw something up – it just doesn’t work – so it can take a little while to figure out where the typo is.
As someone who started when tables (ugh) were pretty much the only way to get anything close to precise positioning, I really love how simple CSS makes it to just move things around and place them where you want. Does it take a bit of practice? Absolutely.. but you end up with a much better-looking website. PHP and AJAX have their place, but you can easily build sites with just HTML5/CSS that totally blow out of the water anything you could have done ten years ago.
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