Time to stop procrastinating

I have been wanting to learn how to develop web pages for a long time. Inevitably, something always happened so I would put off starting the learning process for another day. I decided a couple of weeks ago that I had put it off long enough. Part of what pushed me to go ahead and start learning was helping my friend design his site. I also wanted to try creating site templates.

My learning environment is pretty simple: CMS Made Simple (CMSMS) and Notepad++. I chose to work with CMSMS because it is, well, simple. It’s a lot easier than Joomla! as far as setting it up, management and the template structure. Notepad++ was chosen over a WYSIWYG editor because I like to learn how to edit things manually.

I will admit that I didn’t start completely from scratch. I am using the The Perfect 3 Column Liquid Layout and the The Perfect ‘Left Menu’ 2 Column Liquid Layout from Matthew Taylor as a base for my template development.

Everything is going pretty well with the process. I’m wearing Google out with all of the CSS searches. The W3Schools CSS Tutorial has come in really handy. I’m just happy that, so far, the page output has validated as XHMTL 1.0 Strict and the style sheets have validated as CSS 2.1 even after all my changes.

Who knows. Maybe I’ll be able to hang a “Web Developer” tag from my belt next to the “SQL DBA” buckle. If I end up creating a decent template, I’ll post some screen shots for your heckling pleasure.

You may delay, but time will not. – Benjamin Franklin

27.Mar.08 Internet, Web Apps

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One Response to “Time to stop procrastinating”

Rollie | March 27th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
“Web development” is a pretty broad topic, but I definitely feel your pain on the design part and never finding time. I’ll be interested in knowing how it turns out for you because I’m trying to figure out if it’s just me or if it really is this difficult.

I have trouble with the artsy/creative part of design, but that doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that as simple as part of me thinks HTML/XHTML/CSS/etc. should be, it isn’t. I’ve been doing web development and getting paid for it for a long time now–not a master by any means but decent enough to get paid for it–but I still feel like I don’t know anything about these.

In other words, I guess what I’m asking is why is it that people who can get a handle on at least the essentials of things like PHP or SQL without serious trauma sometimes have difficulty getting something like CSS that should be much simpler in comparison? It seems like it really should make sense, but for some reason to some of us it doesn’t.

Personally, I think one of these days I’d just like to get a real grasp of Flash or something like that and just start doing everything in that. Even though it would feel like cheating in many ways, struggling through translating an idea into reality for web design seems like it shouldn’t be nearly so complicated.