Thursday, 23 September 2010

Burning the midnight oil...

I've dabbled in website development, strictly as a sideline - never really admitting I do it.  One of my clients recently asked for their website to be totally revamped.  Nice and simple site. Not too many pages.  They were very pleased with it.  Then the Principal asked if I could do one for her son, who runs a Real Estate firm in the USA.  Requests for a blog and database etc... whoa.  I tried very hard to wriggle out of it, but when the cheque arrived before I had even started, I felt I didn't have much choice.

Quick - Amazon.  Bought a couple of books (knowledge in cold storage).  Both good but one in particular has been revolutionary.  I ordered new software on the back of it (which I'm still waiting for) but I feel empowered.  I am beginning to understand what I'm doing now, the fog is lifting.  I can deconstruct what is really going on behind the scenes.  Sounds strange but I've always used WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) software up to this point.  But for many reasons it has been really restricting me and it bloats the code.  WYSIWYG works well until things do not go as planned - trying to edit the code was like wading through treacle as I hadn't learned the basics from scratch.  Now that's all changing.  I'm really starting to understand what the code can actually produce and how I can manipulate that code, this time to my tune.  I might be back in control.

It really is like another language with strict unforgiving grammatical rules, but hey ho I've never been a first past the post kind of person.   Always a plodder that (hopefully) gets there in the end.

My Web Design Bible
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