I have been “trained” in the design of websites via HTML based coding at university, and considerable experience both personally and commercially. Unfortunately none of the websites I have done are still up on the net (DS Electrical, Pigs Can Fly, and many more…) for various reasons (some of the businesses are dissolved, some of the sites have been thoroughly revamped in the face of the new virus)….
Virus? I mean, of course, Content Management Systems.
What this means to you or me, is a visual display “theme” or “skin”, which is used to format what is essentially a bunch of texts, with varying tags applied to them. It sounds so simple, and it is. Varying from the advanced solutions (such as Joomla!, the most complicated, but most flexible beast available at the time of writing), to the simplest - a basic blog such as this you see before you.
This means my HTML experience and training has become useless. Really. Everything I did before is done differently now. (You can see my old homepage for digital vinyl here: but you’ll need to enable the archaic javascript to see it in full glory). This is very often the case with technology, and I am really not interested in doing any more professional websites - even though I have already taken the bull by the horns and learned and conf
igured no less than 3 CMS systems already.
The reason is that while updating them is really easy, designing the skins is NOT. Don’t let anyone tell you it is - they are very very geeky. But anyway - the reason for my post is because I have found the solution for me, and very likely, for you:
It’s quick and dirty, and filthy, and there are a million easy to apply and use plugins and themes already available which are really quite something. Have a try at dragging the widgets to the right of this text around like windows, and dropping them to reorder them. You’ll see what I mean. Program that with Dreamweaver - I dare you! The secret, of course, is that I didn’t do any of this fine work, and neither did the author of the theme I am using! The new disease is here, and it will not let you do the same work as countless other people have already done! It’s called Open Source, and it means we need no longer re-invent the wheel.
The theme I am using utilised an open source window routine for the widgets; This in turn allowed the author of my theme to concentrate on making the theme look like MacOs really well, and polish the overall finish of the theme instead of getting bogged down with technical fiddlery! In turn, I was then able ot concentrate on populating my site with good content instead of fiddling for months on the graphical design and function, and leaving scant detail and content for people to actually read.
No doubt you’ll agree that two (or three, or fifty) heads are most definitely better than one.
