A New Year, A New Site

With a new year upon us, I have decided to redesign my website. My last design was more of a business class site. This year I have decided to follow SmashingMagazine.com’s blog post about the death of the blog post.

I have always had problems keeping up with blogging, which is why I had my site tailored as a business site. There was always just too much work to do and not enough time to sit down and actually think out a blog post. So, with the new year I decided to take things differently, and attempt to write a new blog post at least once a month. I am sure that some months I will be doing more then one, but for the most part, you can expect a new blog post every month.

What can you expect?

Not only can you expect blog posts every month, you can also expect them to be about real web design subjects. Almost everyday I stumble upon something I have to figure out for web design. Rather it be a Wordpress solution, or just something as simple as the unknown html address tag, there is always something. With this new design, I am going to be dedicating myself to writing these problems down, and trying to bring them to the people. Often times when troubleshooting I spend hours trying to find someone who has the same problem I have. It just slows down productivity. Site’s like SmashingMagazine.com and NetTuts.com are awesome for their inspiration and learning material, but they normally don’t help the reader with their everyday web design problems.

That is what this blog is going to be about. Helping you as the reader find the answers to your everyday problems. Every month there will be a good sized post that pertains to one problem that I had been struggling with. Most of the other problems I have, will most likely be going in a category called Snippets, and will be there for you to search and ponder on.

What I am doing this year?

This year shall be marked in history as a milestone. With 2010 upon us, we can see that new things are coming out and about. This month many technology gurus watched in awe of CES, as they released information about things such as the new OLED Transparent Screens. With technology quickly advancing, and the world becoming more and more Internet driven, I decided it was time for me to do the same. As a web designer, I often looked at the web as just a part of my everyday life, something I “just did”. There was never a real understanding of how things worked, nor a background on how to learn how they worked. Well this year, these things are about to change.

Most people would agree in saying that formal education doesn’t help much in the web development world.

Most people would agree in saying that formal education doesn’t help much in the web development world, but that real world experience is where you really learn. More often then not a person will go to a university or college, and spend four years learning the hottest technology when they entered college. By the time you get out of college, everything you learned is out dated and no longer being used in the work force. So then you find yourself scrambling to find the latest and greatest books and tutorials to learn whats new and hot. This is how I felt for years, until I finally sat down and decided I needed to learn PHP.

This year (2009) at Rosemont Media, I had sort of “volunteered” to add some features to an application we have been working on. With not really having any background in PHP besides maybe writing Wordpress themes and loops, I was determined to learn as much as I could. I spend many days and nights reading the PHP.net website and the tutorials on W3CSchools.com on PHP. I read what had to be 1000 pages of information on this vast programming language, but still knew nothing about it. With the pressure from my employer, I had to begin work no matter how much I learned. I struggled with this because I still had no idea what OOP really was, but I knew I had to grasp this opportunity.

With the onset of frustration, I decided that I needed to get some education under my belt. Yes, I know that what I learn in school might actually be most likely outdated by they time I graduate, I am going for a new reason. If nothing else, I plan to learn how to learn from DeVry University. The school gives me the option to learn either C#, VisualBasic, or C++. Even though neither of these languages are really open source standards, I decided that I could do one of two things. I could either sit there and learn the languages and then become a Microsoft programmer guy. Or I could sit there learn the languages, and take notes on how to learn a new language. Most of the time a language is just syntax, and is very similar to another language in the way that it works. I am going to learn from DeVry University the logic and design behind programming an application and how to do it in any language.

The new design

I decided to try and stay very similar to my old design, but to make it more simple. I don’t have nearly as many graphics in this site, and nearly not as much design. I used the same colors, and most of the things that require a image, are done with CSS3. “Oh no” you might be saying, CSS3 isn’t cross browser compatible. IE6 users are not going to be able to see those box-shadows or those gradients. Well that is where you are wrong.

IE5.5 and up has had some really cool features in them that most people don’t know about. Just about everything that I can do in CSS3 I can do in the filter:progid that IE has built in. The features may not look as stunning as they would in Firefox, Safari, or Chrome but they don’t look as plain.

Don’t be worried though, I have saved the old version of my site. Feel free to browse it and compare the two designs together and then leave me a comment on this blog post to tell me what you think.

Well until next month, “Happy Interneting!”.