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: “montgomeryintl.com”:http://montgomeryintl.com *Good:* lots of whitespace, cute rollovers, some decent photographs. *Bad:* layout tables, rollover e-mail links are graphics and not text. Likewise, “montgomeryimages.com”:http://montgomeryimages.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, “inthewoodsstore.com”:http://inthewoodsstore.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”:http://ellencarrolldesigns.com 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
