"Making the simple complicated is commonplace;
making the complicated simple,
awesomely simple,
that's creativity."Charles Mingus
What's All This, Then?
This is the next step in a fascinating journey. Over a decade ago I put up my first Web site, a Geocities free site. I remember worrying about which ‘neighborhood’ was the best fit, certainly a moot point now, but a great concept.
I built that site with Netscape’s editor, which at that time was a good WYSIWYG, beginning place for someone with no HTML experience—or the tiniest notion of how to hard code. I still not much for hard coding, but I could if there were’t better options. I started learning HTML by stealing code that did what I liked from other pages. This, of course, required wading through the source code and figuring out what I was looking for. As the Netscape editor versions got worse, I learned more HTML just to make things work the way I wanted them to do. That site morphed into the online home for DC's Feminist Chorus (http://www.oocities.org/Wellesley/5043/index.html). You will notice the address reflects the old neighborhood structure.
Now that you're rolling
Once you start doing this, it’s like potato chips. I put up the old site for the Sister Singers Network (SSN), since the network was moving beyond the phone tree stage and the Internet was the obvious next step. The new site (with the heavy lifting done by Midge Stocker) took the lists and other elements of the old site, and now allows member choruses to keep their data current.
I believe that a communications hub is one of the best applications for a Web site. It gave us the chance to reach beyond old limits and allowed SSN, a network that is not an organization, to work together across the country to achieve a common goal. Smart use of the Web and e-mail lists has allowed the Network to revive itself and continue to grow. We have presented two festivals mostly by electronic communications between the Helm and the host choruses. We still had some face to face meetings--but the economics of the new tools was a major factor in getting us back on track
HTML > CSS
Once I have sites up and running, I always want to improve them. I was beginning to see the term CSS popping up in tech news, just as valid code and accessibility issues began to concern me. Yes, I really DO lay awake at night and worry about this stuff. If I were starting out now, I'd be thinking seriously about a degree in Information Architecture. Fortunately the Web is a great resource if you have no money and want to learn about something.
I decided CSS was the next thing I needed to learn. I started with styling the text appearance, very small CSS files. I was quite proud of myself.
Then at work I was given the task of making a blog match the look of the rest of a site. The Movable Type CSS seemed to go on forever and use lots of stuff I’d never seen before. So I started to wade through the lines and lines of code until I had figured out how to do what I had been asked to do. I never could find where that extra white space came from—but it’s all gone now.
I started looking for a way to move from the all HTML to a CSS format for the sites I was running (see links). I found the one that did what I wanted, two columns, as I have always thought three make things seem too jammed together. Of course, this single column is quite spacious indeed. Now I could do from scratch, but I learned by making the template run they way I needed it to do.
On some sites I use a combination of actual graphic buttons and CSS for the menu, a tweak I found at Builder.com (now TechRepublic) . I like the flexibility of design over pure CSS. For this site, I opted for pure CSS in horizontal, using a design by Eric Meyer.
So what’s next?
I finally found a position that allows me to focus full time on the Web. It took over a year, but I guess a really good fit is worth waiting for. Now, more learning experiances. I'm getting more marketing than I ever wanted, and broadening and deepening my HTML and CSS skills
The Web is a tool, and good tools are usually intuitive. It doesn't matter how pretty it is if you can't get it to do the job. The Mingus quote at the top is always the goal: simple to use, easy to navigate, crisp and clean to the eye.
Carol E. Wheeler
