Thursday, August 18, 2005

Updated template

When I first set up this blog, I decided to just use one of Blogger's ready-to-use templates. I wasn't sure how much time I was going to put into it, so I didn't want to spend a ton of time creating my own template. Besides, I like pretty things but don't have a designer's eye.

I've known that I wanted to edit it into a three-column layout for a while, but never got around to it. So I sat down last night, determined to make the change. How long could it take, right? It's not like HTML's real programming. Famous last words...

It's been at least 5 years since I've done any serious web development outside of Domino. The CSS revolution has passed me by - I'm strictly a tables girl. Well, the author of this template didn't believe in tables. I know the basics of CSS; styling paragraphs and other text elements is no big deal. But absolute positioning, layers, and z-indexes are way over my head.

It took 6 hours. Yikes. Time to get a book and try to catch up, if only to say that I can.

4 comments:

Stan Rogers said...

Not bad at all for a table girl. Not bad at all. There is one thing to change, though, for the sake of Internet Explorer, and that's to get rid of the "text-align: center" in the BODY {} selector. With it, the CSS width of the page will be about 100 pixels wider than the browser window, and you need to scroll right to see the right-hand sidebar at 1024 x 768. That may leave you with about 5 pixels of playing around to get the dots to line up properly at the edges of the left-hand sidebar in IE, but I wouldn't worry about that too much. (IE users might not be your most discerning customers. Get rid of the scrollbar and they'll never know the difference.)

Esther said...

Thanks for the heads-up, Stan. I don't even have IE on my machine at home (Linux). It looks pretty much the same in Firefox on any platform. I suppose I'm just as guilty as the lazy developers who only test in IE.

I'll fix it tonight.

Thomas "Duffbert" Duff said...

Ah, yes... the joys of learning CSS. :) Been there, still doing that.

Email me if you need some book recommendations. :)

Esther said...

Thanks, Jon, although I can't really take credit for the design.