Crimson Blog

Web design is a time consuming process. While using CSS one can make large broad changes very quickly, one of the drawbacks to learning it is the amount of tweaking that must be done in order to make a page look perfect. In producing this gallery site I have learned a great deal, and that means time saved and knowledge gained. If I were to reproduce this site from scratch, or produce something similar to it, it would require much less time simply due to the experiences I had trying one thing, failing, and then trying another. I know I am just starting to dig in to the power of PHP.

I am very glad to have embarked on this project. With every challenge I faced I learned something new. For instance, I was having trouble styling this very blog. While others created themes from scratch, I looked to find a working theme and rewrite it to suit my needs. I have learned that doing something like that ends up being more of a problem than a solution. Because the CSS was ordered in such a drastically different way than I was used to reading and writing, it was difficult translate back and forth out of it. I constantly found myself walled in by CSS rules that I could not locate and therefore could not change.

The other sizeable hurdle to creating this place was the gallery. Upon hearing the stories about how tough it was to style Gallery 2 I didn’t want to start off on another tough CSS project. Instead I wanted something that I built myself. I had to figure out how to get Jquery, PHP, Flash, and AJAX to talk seamlessly to each other. I am still fighting to get Flash’s dynamic content to load itself when I call to it, but that is something I will continue to work on.

With eight more hours of work, there are several issues that I need to resolve. Probably first and foremost figuring out how to get the rest of the gallery functioning properly. Styling the pages with a JavaScript detector and getting my Flash to load its external content. With that completed I would move on to fixing a few minor graphical errors that crop up in IE 7. It is a little curious as I tried it once on a windows machine with IE7 and it broke rather badly, and I tried it once on my own windows box with IE7 and there were just a few bugs. With those two things completed, if I were still feeling ambitions I would probably try and go to make the wordpress stop giving me a list of HTML validation errors.

On the long term, I would like to continue to add to the design of the page. I feel that there is more that I can do with added time. I had a couple of ideas to add images to the headers like a gear, and break up all of my straight lines with some more interesting curves. As far as content goes, I want to add more to my gallery, as what is there now is really still just a prototype to see if my theory on how to make it would work. I want to write up a more professional resume and place it in the multimedia section, and also begin to gather up multimedia resources and link and relate to them in my blog.

In the future, I want to learn how to create more efficient and readable CSS. I learned an awful lot from the CSS sheet that I remade to be my own and I want to put that to work in something else. I want this webpage to incorporate more flash and more AJAX although I’m not sure where I will put it all next.