So… I decided it was high time I made a proper serious grown-up work-related site, saying what I do and how you can pay me to do it for you. At the moment, there’s only a brief mention in one of the pages on this site, and that’s not exactly earning me money.
So, anyway… I opened up a text editor and typed all the usual HTML structural bits… head, title, body and various divs for the main bits of the page. And then I opened another file for the CSS. And then it occurred to me that it must be about three years since I did any of this stuff properly. Whenever I’ve rewritten this site, I’ve always just recycled old code; apart from replacing all the tables with proper CSS and installing the Greymatter blogging software a couple of years ago, most of this basic template has remained the same since early 2001. And the upshot of that is that I’ve forgotten all those routine coding tricks I used to use automatically. Nothing like professional web design stuff, but little details I’d found which enabled me to create okay-looking sites with the minimum of code.
I looked through the CSS for this site, I looked at a few of the excellent tutorial sites linked from Jeffrey Zeldman’s ‘externals’ page and I glanced up at the big ‘DHTML and CSS’ book on the shelf.
And then I decided I’d just nick a load of code from other people’s sites. I’ll let you know when it’s done…