Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Michael Czeiszperger <michael AT czeiszperger.org>]

About six months ago a "close relative" decided a website was needed,  
and it seemed like a good opportunity to get up to date on this new  
CSS stuff, as the last time I designed a website was in 1999, which  
was less of a design, and more a collection of HTML tags.

After the project got started, it became apparent that it was both a  
huge challenge and way above my head. I ended up doing all of the  
photography, general page design, and copy writing, all of which is  
beyond my skill level.  Take for example, product shots.  I'm pretty  
handy with a camera, but have never done product photography, and it  
months of shooting and re-shooting and photoshop editing before the  
pictures looked even remotely acceptable.

The page design turned out to be hardest part, as even after reading  
Steve Champeon's excellent book Cascading Style Sheets, Separating  
Content from Presentation, I still couldn't put together something  
remotely acceptable.  Luckily I found:

http://www.medialab.com/sitegrinder/

This enabled me to design a template and individual pages in  
Photoshop, and then generate CSS and HTML pages.  The pages still had  
to be tweaked by hand, the CSS edited, but at least it was a way to  
quickly mock-up designs and get the pages largely created.

After the site was created, it was such a let-down to see it on  
Windows...  I can't believe how poorly pages are rendered, especially  
the anti-aliasing.

Anyway, after going through all of this I definitely have a much  
higher appreciation for web professionals, not that I held them in  
low regard before, but there's nothing like trying your hand at  
something to gain a new appreciation for those will skills.

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I used to read, but it's faster to just make up stuff. -- Wally
        -- michael at czeiszperger dot org, Chapel Hill, NC