Thursday, May 24, 2012

Webpage-building: I definitely dig this

After doing only the very first Dreamweaver tutorial I've already built a webpage (it's for the postdoctoral association that I've recently become President of, but that's another story). It's not beautiful, but it's the first webpage I've written that isn't simple HTML. This was fun: really fun. One thing I discovered is how little Dreamweaver actually does, or rather, that there is a whole range of degrees to which you can lean on it. It's like training wheels. I did most of the work in split screen mode (where you see the page you're creating on one side and the HTML on the other) and found that after a little while, it was easier to simply enter the code myself than use the built-in functions.

The other thing I learned, hardly surprising for a fist attempt, is how important a comp is. For this project, I started with one of the standard layouts, then began modifying the CSS to customize it. Without a plan in mind, the various divs, paddings, borders and margins quickly got out of hand. I'm not sure they all add up in the final website, but it looks OK and it's satisfactory for our current needs. This was mainly a learning experience in any case.


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