css: bethesda

I spent more than three hours trying to re-acquaint myself with the inner-workings of CSS tonight. I had forgotten how intrinsically different the code is from plain ol' HTML. Frustratingly different.

Why?

Why else? Money! I'm doing the web site for West of the Lake, a six-acre garden run by a non-profit in my hometown. (A shout out to Manitowoc!)

Anyway, I have... well, um... certain connections with the organization. Not to mention that I worked at the gardens for a couple years, and I was good friends with the original owners before they passed on.

And now the site is finally getting somewhere. The new design, as seen here looks essentially the same as the original (my intention) but there are NO BLOODY HTML TABLES in the entire thing!

That, my friends, family, ex-coworkers, and strange people who have nothing better to do but read a random blog entry from me, is nothing short of a miracle. OK, it's not a miracle. But, basically, I can now do the same thing on every page without having to have a couple hundred lines of code in each file. SSI cuts down on having the links and copyright in each file too. Woo hoo.

Now all I need to do is get some of the additional photos I took earlier this month up, update the content, create a map for directions, and put it all together and it'll be a real web site... just in time for the fall and the closing of the gardens for the season. And it'll need some tweaking before next summer, no doubt.

Oh well.

Another project I'm working on is the redesign (finally, yay!) of the PlaneBusiness home page. I did the subscriber design quite a long time ago, but we're now finally getting to the public site, which had not been a big priority. Unfortunately, you can't see the mockups yet. Hopefully, it'll be done soon and I'll post a new link.

Oh. Yes, I am billing $40 an hour for those three hours of design. Cha-ching.

Posted by jonathan at July 19, 2003 04:37 AM