Principles


There's a principle in physics where the force applied, minus the countervailing forces, gives the work done - which means you might expend a lot of force and still do no work.

I think there's a principle in website design where the work done is slightly proportional to the neatness of the result, but inversely proportional to the impact created - unless there's no work done, in which there's no impact at all.

In other words, you can spend an entire day figuring out how to make a caption line up with a graphic correctly, and no one'll notice. But you can take five seconds to change the background colour, and everyone notices.

When I haven't been:
(1) Coming up with more lyrics (here and here)
(2) Making notes for others not (yet?) finished
(3) Attempting to create a living space that doesn't have, um things living in it
(4) Spending full working days doing favours for ungrateful bastards who I will be shortly telling to fuck off
(5) Failing to record anything - see (4)

...I've been teaching myself some website design.

I can now make graphics line neatly up with blurb. I can put text into independent parallel columns - which is more awkward than you'd think. And I can have a randomly selected graphic pop up every time you visit a page - click on either of the links to see.

The secret is: Pretend all content is a table of figures. You can arrange anything if it's in a table.

You can now also send me email. I mean, you can do that already, but now you can do it from my website. I think.

Oh, and I've got a 404 page, for when everything else goes tits up.

The ungrateful bastard wants me to do some website design. Now that I know a bit more about how to do it, I've determined that I really don't want to do this professionally.

5 comments:

  1. You need to pick up css. Much easier than building using tables and properly compliant too. Also you can get loads of free css website templates.

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  2. Yes, I probably should do more with CSS. It's just rather a large outlay of time for what I'm expecting to be a small unexpanding collection of tasks.

    Recording studio first, cascading style sheets second.

    Besides, HTML5 is coming out soon....

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  3. You need to either learn to say "NO" or find yourself some new friends!

    Good luck with the web design and the living space design. I'd imagine your local library would've some books on how to do either.

    The 404 page looks great--and it works fantastic!

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  4. NOOOOOO!!! Don't use tables!! that's web design from about twelve years ago!!

    Look at http://www.blueprintcss.org/ for a great way of arranging your web sites in a grid layout. This video tutorial should also help you understand what it does: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHLrEF9tHjw

    Talk to me if you need some help.

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  5. @Aimee:

    NOOOOOO!!! Don't use tables!! that's web design from about twelve years ago!!

    I'll get into CSS sometime, but at the moment old fashioned HTML (with a little basic CSS and Javascript) gives me a couple of advantages:

    * Small file size - each page less than 10K
    * Code that's simple enough to manually edit without getting lost
    * Layout that's basic but as flexible as I need it to be - for current needs

    There doesn't seem a lot of point in losing all that to recreate what I already do with tables. I'll keep the URLs though, for the future.

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