by Janae Wiedmaier 18.July 2008 14:06
Looking back at K's first post (And I refer to her affectionately as K for Karina, which is most confusing since we also have Kyle), I have to admit that I have never been a tables addict. Unfortunately, I have been many other things. My own web design, the majority of which happened in highschool and the first two years of college, a lifetime ago really, had far worse implications and applications I'm afraid.
The first sin was frames. After all, in 1999, how did you separate a website out if you didn't use frames? Especially when your experience with web design was not in notepad but rather in the amazing FrontPage. Looking back at all those scrollbars makes me feel more than a bit ill, and I'll continue explaining once I come back from the restroom. Please excuse me for a moment.
-Insert Dramatic Pause Here-
All right, as I get seated... if frames weren't bad enough, my sense of color style was. For a modern woman (girl at that time, I suppose), you'd think I'd have moved past the rainbow colors of the 80's and into the 1990's. Or perhaps have been looking forward to Y2K and the turn of the millenium. Instead, my genre of a fancy webpage could be explained in the following terms: Flashy, Fabulous, Framy, and Forever. That last one due to the load times it would take for each image on the page.
Unfortunately, my next fatal sin is far worse. This can be explained in simple terms as well: Adobe Photoshop. I don't know how many people have ever designed a web page in Photoshop. I'm sure that it's what most designers use. However, it's one thing to design in Photoshop and another completely to use the slicing tool and turn it all into an even bigger forever. Yes, again I am referring to load times. If I thought that frames and flashy images were heavy on my little 56K modem, then I should have considered how a site created completely by images would react.
That's two deadly sins so far, my friends. Luckily, it seems I have found the light. And this is the god Div and his beautiful wife CSS.
Perhaps bowing down and worshiping them for rescuing me from myself is a bit extreme, but I still feel like I should do so nonetheless. Unfortunately, wrapping my head around divs, wrappers, padding, margin, and all of that was a learning curve of all learning curves. For someone who had come from a completely visual way of web design to going to notepad and building a site from the ground up, I have to admit that it was a challenge. Probably the biggest challenge of my life so far. I am happy to say that I feel I have succeeded.
So, here I am at Mindfly with my new gods. We're chillin', having a good ol' time.
Hello, friends, my name is Janae Wiedmaier and I worship Div and CSS. Hopefully they will help me stay on the straight and narrow.