Tuesday, September 12, 2006
I fought the HTML and the HTML won.
If you have been following my web site nightmare, and I know you have, then you are seeing what it looks like when someone works without training wheels. I love the power and the possibilities of recreating the whole site using pretty much raw materials, but I am learning that I have ignored my basic HTML skills for too long.
The nifty little generators that toss in some java script or DHTML are handy, but they rarely do exactly what you want. If I use flash menus, then some people can't see them. Specifically some Linux geeks completely refuse to use flash. Let's face it, I am counting on some of those geeks to be my core audience. I can't alienate them by choice of a web tool.
The funny thing to me is that Plone had so much overhead, but it got out of the way for putting text up on the site. Now I have no overhead and no formatting problems, but I am finding the site navigation to be a pain.
The truth is that I know what to do, I just don't want to do it. I need to sit down and create a site map by hand and then create the pages and navigation links. Once I do that it will be easy to just crank out the code.
For now, please ignore the uncentered graphics and horrid layout. It will get back to something that is usable.
The nifty little generators that toss in some java script or DHTML are handy, but they rarely do exactly what you want. If I use flash menus, then some people can't see them. Specifically some Linux geeks completely refuse to use flash. Let's face it, I am counting on some of those geeks to be my core audience. I can't alienate them by choice of a web tool.
The funny thing to me is that Plone had so much overhead, but it got out of the way for putting text up on the site. Now I have no overhead and no formatting problems, but I am finding the site navigation to be a pain.
The truth is that I know what to do, I just don't want to do it. I need to sit down and create a site map by hand and then create the pages and navigation links. Once I do that it will be easy to just crank out the code.
For now, please ignore the uncentered graphics and horrid layout. It will get back to something that is usable.
