website creation

I dont usually talk about work related things, but I thought I would like to document my webcreation process. Throughout college, I've always been amazed by well-designed websites. It didn't seem that complicated to me, as almost invariably most of these websites were created by "graphic designers", thus, must not be that complicated.

I decided to take on the challenge of re-designinging my company website. First I had to learn CSS as i had learned from a product designer/ web developer friend that it is the new standard for web design. So I looked it up. I'm not sure what entirely the benefit of it is, other than the actual process of learning CSS "containers", floating and creating layout in general, has afforded a new way of design. It is indeed much more flexible to redesign the individual elements of a website and really, the table based design of HTML days of yore really is quite cumbersome.

So I learned CSS all of last week.
I had a tutorial from my webdev friend a few months ago where he taught me the difference betweens and classes and ids. Pretty much this is all you need to know to do CSS.

I then went and tagged websites that were very well done.
Smashing Magazine has some very good resources for web inspiration. I then also looked for company websites in my company's "category" of products and sought for inspiration there. Most designs in that category were simply lackluster, but it is best to keep this in mind, as our clientelle would probably be more intimidated than impressed by a fashion forward website.

I then had to learn the nuts and bolts of CSS. So I delicioused CSS and true enough, it was a gold mine of resources. For any webdevs out there, I hihgly recommend using delicious for all your researching needs. My two favorite websites for this are:
1) HTML Dog and 2) W3 Schools. These two sites will give you everything you need to know to catch up on sites.

Then came the bewildering idea of how to handle tables now that CSS has completely obliterated tables. For some reason, the idea of floating was completely bewildering to me and some websites were simply floating left and floating right; this is a completely different way of doing it with tables. Somehow this website explained everything I needed to know .

Then came the problem with Menus. I liked the idea of having drop down menus as they look streamlined and allow for easier navigation. I liked Stu Nicholl's site for its amazingly extensive collection of open source Menus completely done in CSS. However, I wanted to do a combination of text and images rollovers and this site albeit butt ugly looks promising.

Finally, I also had to learn flash because my boss wanted me incorprate it into its website. This site was surprisingly the most straightforward way to learn flash. Then I wanted to get ambitious and add clickable elements to my swf. Amazingly Adobe has a very rich collection of video resources that I highly recommend. Talk about taking advantage of their own platform (so awesome).

I absolutely love the internet. If I run into any problem I simply google it and I can pretty much find a little forum somewhere, or a tutorial site that discusses the very problem I have. How amazing when you create an entirely open platform.