Just Write

With a grand total of expe­ri­ence build­ing four web­sites so far, I feel as though I’ve tra­versed a decade of web design history.

The first two are sim­i­lar: mont​gomery​intl​.com *Good:* lots of white­space, cute rollovers, some decent pho­tographs. Bad: lay­out tables, rollover e-​mail links are graph­ics and not text. Like­wise, mont​gomery​im​ages​.com *Good:* same, with a javascript slide show that I like so far. Bad: same, and rollover nav links are again graph­ics and not text.

Third, inthe​woods​store​.com *Good:* the infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture is accept­able, all the right infor­ma­tion in the right places, file sizes and load speeds suf­fi­ciently small and fast. Not so good: the scope of the project didn’t fit hav­ing a shop­ping cart. Bad: Okay, I admit it — I tried What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG). And no, it didn’t end up sav­ing any time, pro­duced unwieldy code, and the lay­out breaks if you resize the text.

Fourth, Ellen Car­roll Designs At this point, I “dis­cov­ered” web stan­dards. Yes, I know they’ve been around for a long time. Not that I’m an expert, but I don’t under­stand why any­one would build a site any other way. Good: XHTML and CSS. It val­i­dates too, except for the script for site log­ging that Yahoo web­host­ing inex­plic­a­bly adds after the </html> tag. Much bet­ter. Not so good: except for one table on a form page (I had to get the site fin­ished, ‘ya know?)

Progress. Growth. Learning. Good stuff.