Technical Blog – Page 46

Geekery For The Week

I’ve been trying out WordPress to set up a friend’s online art gallery.

But I just kept getting stuck on the same thing over and over.Because I am no WP genius my options are to look for a theme that resembles what I want.I do not like to use themes.But with WP it’s different because a theme isn’t just a design,it’s widget-ready and set up with all the correct WP “hooks”.I don’t quite yet know what all of these are so to fast-track my last job(my client had a short build time)I just heavily converted a premade theme. Now that I have the luxury of time I have considered making my own theme for my friend’s artwork…but I dunno.Seems like a lot of fiddling about when I could just load up a PHP script or 2.

Is it worth it in order to have the WP community and all the cool plugins and etc to turn to? If this were a site for a friend who meant to actually use her site then it would be worth it.But all she wants is her art online.That’s it.Just a place to send folks to see her work.She isn’t going to blog.She probably won’t want comments.I don’t want her art pages to have comments.
I will just have to think about it.

Sheru Arora Thinks I’m Great

I asked my last client to write a little bit about how great it was to work with me.

Sheru Arora

Sion, it was a pleasure having you create my webpage for me. You’re an extremely talented professional and make working with you very easy. I’ll definitely be referring my colleagues to you and hope we can work again soon!
Good Luck and Thanks again,

Arora

AskArora.com

He left that as a comment on an unrelated post so I moved it here so it can have it’s own category.

Stop it with the tables!

8 times out of ten when I commit to do a new project it’s usually an already built site that the client wants updated. Usually they think they don’t need or want a full redesign but invariably when I start reviewing the files and documents I find a rats nest of tables.I simply do not understand the designer working today who uses these outdated methods! I’m starting to think it’s sheer laziness on their part. Maybe it’s the use of outdated and discontinued designer software like Frontpage,who knows? Maybe they learned their skills in the mid ninetees when there wasn’t much use of CSS or much attention paid to standards.
I had to use tables for a job recently because the client specifically requested them.I probably could have recreated the same effect with some suave list styling and the client woulda been none the wiser.But I had given the project enough of my time and it was a last minute request and so I relented.I realised that even if I didn’t like to use them in this one particular case it was ok because it was tabular information.Tubular!

So this latest paying gig is for a site built in February 2007.Not 1997. It’s chockfull of tables and unvalidatable because there’s no doctype and even if there were there’s some crazy javascript blocking everything anyway. I had to upload a page to my own server just to make sure it was valid.
I’m very proud of myself for creating a layout for this site with CSS because it wasn’t easy to do. Each new page I have to make consists of 2-3 thumbnails on each side of one large pic. I’m fairly new to floats,I’ve only been using them for six months but I don’t know how I got along with out them. With this layout, to achieve the effect I wanted, I had to float one set of thumbnails to the right,place the large image in a margin 0 auto fixed width and fluid height div and the left set of thumbs div could just hang out. The right floated div had to go first in the source then the left thumbs div and then the center image div. I found this out just by experimenting.
This layout I designed is going to seriously help me design future sites,especially ones for e commerce because it is perfect for a catalog layout.

Using Dreamweaver May Stunt Your Growth

I strongly believe Dreamweaver keeps you ignorant of knowing what html and css are for,what they can do and how to solve problems with both.

I think it should only be used by experienced designers so they can cut down on the time it takes to design a new template,not by folks wanting to know how to make pages fast without knowing what goes into the design of a page.

Maybe you’ll think I just say this because I am threatened by folks having the ability to DIY.Nope.Because a noob will f up and make a total hash of things and end up having to hire someone anyway.

And I have nothing but respect for the person who wants to do it themselves.