These past couple of weeks I have been working on a birthday present for my sister. So for her present I put to good use my degree and built her and her husbands wedding/life update website. The website presented many challenges and made me research and learn new things. Some of the things the problems that I faced was needing to put about 180 pictures up (soon to be 800+) and to embed a guestbook. For the pictures I used a JavaScript tab interface and then had a separate tab for every gallery. This didn’t work out perfect and it takes some time to load, so its not perfect but works for now. The other was embedding a guestbook. For this I used Ascended Guestbook. This was relatively easy to set up and embed although it did give me some problems that were easy to fix once I realized what it was (.html –> .php). Its a continuing project, but for now the site is up and running.

I also passed 2,000 unique visitors for this blog. If you remember back in August I blogged about 1,000 unique visitors and I thought it was a big deal. It took 8 months to get to 1,000 visitors and now only 4 months to get to 2,000. So if this keeps up then at the end of January I should hit 3,000. I doubt that, but we will see what happens.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been updating my web site as well as learning and implementing CSS (Cascading Style Sheets ) into my design. Now since I had little clue of how CSS worked and how to design with it I was a little intimidated to say the least. After reading some articles online, watching some examples on youtube and looking at some examples I got the basics down and was able to get the gist of it. While searching for examples and information I had to wade through a lot of websites that weren’t all that helpful or were to vague to figure out, so I decided to compile a list here so people could have easy access to many of the sites.

1. w3schools.com-Where to get all the basic info that you need to get started. Also check out the example pages where you can view and test out some of the basic CSS skills.
2. Youtube tutorial-Its a little long at a little under 40 mins. But it goes step by step starting for the beginning of how to create a page using CSS.
3. DynamicDrive-Where I figured out how to get the menu and other examples to work right and implemented. They also have a lot of other information on web design.
4. Smashing Magazine-This is more a collection of links but is been a very good resource for me. They show you good designs, layouts, and navigation along with having  links to how to create different things like graphs, forms, and image galleries. Keep checking back here for good CSS techniques and other design software.

*Bonus little bit of information that I was having trouble with. When I was entering different lines of information the line spacing was way off. So to get the line information you just enter this into your CSS and then add the class to the lines that are spaced to far apart. Just change the percentage to what you want:

p.small {line-height: 90%}