May 20, 2004
A few additions to the portfolio
Today i have added some things to the portfolio, as the site needs a little update. I also plan to get the photographs section running soon and some other little additions.
Things have been busy lately, with exciting and less exciting things, so i had to slow down with the website. Thats why i feel i need to try to catch up a little.
October 26, 2003
Rush.media Relaunch
After a relatively moderate development time of a little over a month working on this on and off, i am now introducing a redesign of my site. I say moderate development time, because with this design i took the plunge into the cold waters of CSS-based design. Being more or less new to this, it has been a nice learning experience to understand the possibilities of CSS. Besides pure theory, there is still quite a bit of rocks thrown in your way when it comes to cross-browser compatibility. Ironing out all these little bugs with different browsers probably took just as long as the whole rest of the design process. Still it is the way to go in the future of web development with standards-compliance improving across platforms and browsers.
So what is so special about CSS? Actually a couple of things and solutions to problems that have plagued webdevelopment for a long time. Back in the early days of the internet, HTML was meant to convey information and data, or as we would generally say: “content”. But content is not everything, so webdevelopers are using the possibilities of HTML to graphically layout webpages to make them interesting, attractive and unique. Tables proved to be particularly suitable for this matter, as they allow exact positioning of images, objects or content within table cells, and thus in the browser window. While this is a very reliable and mostly consistent way of laying out webpages, it is at the same time a complete merge of content and formatting. This poses a problem with accessebility and grows webpages unnecessarily big in size.
CSS allows a complete separation of content and formatting, and thus circumvents aforementioned problems. Because it degrades nicely, browsers that do not understand/display the layout will simply display the pure content of the page, keeping the information intact. CSS also makes changes of layout and formatting easier, by keeping all formatting in one place. These are just a few but striking advantages that should make webdevelopers switch to a web-standards compliant site-design using CSS and (X)HTML.
For me, it was pages like the CSS Zen Garden that convinced me of starting to use CSS for all matters of page design, and not merely for the formatting of links etc. Other valuable resources were Doug Bowman’s site Stopdesign, A List Apart or the great forums at Sitepoint. These are great starting points, that should easily give you many days of good reading.
I can say, despite some problems that i first had because of stepping into a new area, it is very well worth it. I am firmly convinced that CSS-based websites will become more and more standard for good reasons. A movement that shouldn’t be missed.