Chapter 2: Creating the Site

I had actually begun playing around with a couple designs in Winter 2006 for the project. Though at the time, my web skills were mainly limited to just HTML and CSS. I had a couple ideas floating around in my head, but over the spring and summer I expanded my knowledge of javascript and php so I had a few more design options.

My idea was that this was to be an experiment in putting together quick, simple, content-rich pages, rather than flexing my coding skills. I also didn't want to sink a whole lot of time into the design side of it.

Thus I put together a simple HTML/CSS template that had the headers, navigation and footers with a blank content div that I could fill for each page. This would let me just copy and paste the template for each page and then just add content.

While this allowed me to enter much of my initial content in one weekend, the trade off was flexibility. As my menu is built into each page, and indeed, into the template, any changes I that I made (changes in page names, new sections, different organization etc.) would have to be manually changed on each page.

So with my template basic code template created, I started adding the design and content elements.