derrynjones.com

So yeh its been a few days since I’ve posted here, and much has happened since my move to the new domain. I’m thinking I’ll split things up so as to ensure things are more easily found via Google.

I’ve been working on the actual site “DerrynJones.com” and so far so good. This time I actually bothered to plan and design the whole thing in advance (WOW, apparently I actually learnt something in my high-school IT classes!). Though before that I needed to brush up on the latest standards for HTML design. To do that I used one of the templates in Adobe Dreamweaver and used it as well just that, a template. This taught me 2 things: 1) Tables are no longer the layout manager of choice, <div> and <id> are used and 2) External CSS is the way to go for styles.

So I knocked it all up as per my plan and I didn’t like it. So I went back to some of my previous website projects and drew inspiration. Luckily most of the changes were purely cosmetic and only required minor changes to the external CSS style sheet. Overall I’m pretty happy with it now, and because I used colours similar to my blog, they blend quite well.

I actually found it much easier to make a ‘modern’ website than using tables to make a layout changes and embedded html tags to define styles.

So I used <div> tags to define each area of the page and <p class = classname> to apply styles; way easier than applying individual font parameters.

I must say its great that we are seeing more modular design when it comes to anything software related.

Also, I decided to check my site against the W3C validator for XHTML Transitional 1.0 and also CSS 2.1. Surprisingly I passed on both so I added their buttons to the bottom of my page to add a little more ‘professional’ touch =D.

Well I think that’s about it for the second.

Coming up next: Bloggin’ along…