Another Website Update

Well the launch of the website is coming up quickly, with only two or three days remaining before its unveiling. I must admit that it is definitely near completion, with just a few final touches needed before I release it to the wild. Its taken a lot longer than I could have imagined, although the site itself isn't very big or grandiose. The main reason its taken so long apart from time constraints is that I had to basically relearn web design to make the site design almost completely CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) based.

I've done a few web sites in my time, and they've all consisted of using the old tried and true method of using tables to lay out the design. Believe it or not this type of design isn't even taught any more, our class at the S.I.T. for web design was the last one that taught web design using this arcane method. Its now all CSS based which makes a lot more sense, unless in the case you haven't learnt it which can make things a little more difficult.

CSS is interesting because you put all your design instructions into the one text file, and you can have every page on your website look to this text file for reference of how to lay everything out and for formatting rules. In the old school of CSS you would just define a few fonts and colors for your text, and that would be about all CSS was used for. Now it is used for the entire layout of website, and you can define layers and place them anywhere you want.

Some of the main advantages of using CSS are as follows :

1. They use take up less space and bandwidth, since you don't have to duplicate formatting code in every page.

2. They are lot more flexible, seeing as you can put elements anywhere on the page, even overlapping other elements if you so desire.

3. They are easier to update, seeing as you only have to change the code in one location instead of every single page if you decide to change the layout or some fonts.

Almost all browsers support the full CSS instruction set now which is nice, seeing as how its been around for many years now. CSS2 is starting to make more prominence, but its probably going to be a little into the future before we start seeing full support for this new development. It may have taken me a lot longer to basically relearn how to code sites, but it was worth it. And as a bonus it definitely shouldn't take as long for future projects.