I’ll admit, it’s been awhile since I took on the task of designing an entirely new Web site. I figured I’m a little rusty, it may take awhile; that was why I decided to set aside time off this weekend to do so. Yet, creating the graphics, writing the HTML and coding the CSS were by far the easiest part of this endeavor…. WordPress is annoying me more than any other program I’ve ever worked with. And I can’t figure out why. I’ve never used WordPress before this site. I had mastered Greymatter, and Blogger is cake. And while my php experience is minimal, the php isn’t what’s bothering me. It’s that what should be working isn’t working. What works in static HTML and CSS isn’t displaying right. And if my MacBook wasn’t so delicate and expensive, I’d probably have kicked it by now.

So anyway, just a note to say the layout is pretty much up. But I’ll be tweaking it, and trying to figure out why the header background isn’t showing up properly for much of the night.

Despite my annoyance, I do have to say, I really did miss designing Web sites regularly. As I was trouble shooting and scanning each line for a missing quote or unclosed div, I couldn’t help but remember that my attention to detail was what made me willing and able to stay up until dawn designing and redesigning typical. Although it’s been awhile. I don’t think this layout turned out half bad.

Update: So, apparently after I worked and reworked and reworked again the code for my header and just about gave up, I got it working. I don’t know why, but re-uploading the image seemed to fix the issue. I can’t believe I just spent an hour troubleshooting something that took 2 seconds to fix. :/ Either way, my site is now up and working.

So, although I bought the domain earlier this week and I set up the WordPress blog a few days ago, it has taken me a little while to figure out the design I want. After copious amounts of time worrying how to craft the perfect online presence for myself (OK, so actually it was mostly me snapping photos of items on my desk before I went home for Thanksgiving and then sitting in my mom’s kitchen with my MacBook playing with Photoshop and worrying about fonts and drop shadows), I’ve managed to come up with a layout I like.

In my journey to this layout (which isn’t up yet, but should be up later tonight) I discovered a few things I either didn’t know or didn’t realize until I started.

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