I’ve had a pair of books, one on HTML/CSS and the other on Javascript/JQuery. I’ve been wanting my profile site to be setup in a certain way so I thought I’d take a stab at picking it up. Took me a couple of weeks to get through the HTML/CSS book and I actually got a pretty decent framework for a site. But, I quickly learned there is a big difference between a working site, and one that actually looks good.
So yeah, function doesn’t equal fashion. I had known HTML for years. It’s one of the first languages you’re introduced to in any capacity, but CSS was pretty new to me. I had a general understanding of how it worked, just not how to really use it. I have to admit, makes complete sense for a designer or someone that has a design given to them. Takes a bit of work, but with some thought, some math, and a little planning, you can totally get a design to work and function in CSS. It’s actually pretty satisfying to make it happen. It’s like the satisfaction of getting a complicated function to return the way you were planning, but with a visible element to add to the satisfaction.
I thought I had a pretty good design going, at least to start. You can see the screenshot using a stock photo. Now as I’m going through and doing this, I’m constantly checking in with Margarita, my fiancee, and getting her opinion. She had just spent the day building her own site on Squarespace. After taking two weeks learning the language, spending a few days getting the site working, responsive, and looking “okay”, she showed me what she did in a day. It looked gorgeous, was functional, responsive, had a bunch of easy widgets for newsletters, was setup for e-commerce, etc. etc. I looked at my site again, looked at her, and asked “Should I just use Squarespace too?”, and with a simple “yeah…” and a nod, that was that.
It was a bit humbling, but also a healthy realization to use the tools available to you. Sure, I’m paying a bit of a premium for Squarespace that I could save on my own, and maybe one day I’ll do that when my CSS skills are up to par. Today is not that day, so here I am.
My attempt at my first CSS build, using a stock photo. Totally responsive, though it did break if the window was too narrow.