Sticks and Stars

Wow, I’ve gotten so much done this weekend! Although sadly “so much” actually equals “anything at all.” I’m not sure if it’s fall or just a much needed cycling back up of my energy in general, but the last couple weekends I’ve managed to get more done than the absolute bare minimum (which is making sure that we have clean bowls and something to wear Monday morning), and this weekend I even managed to move beyond that. I would be so happy if this energy was here to stay…at least for a few more months. I have so many things that need to get done!

Most important of my completed weekend tasks is that I finished my final project for my class. It’s funny, I completed my course work so early that I thought for sure I’d be done early too, but no, here I am, sending my instructor the link a mere three days before my absolute deadline.

But that’s okay. I know that a big part of my delay was procrastination and the intrusion of life in general, and another part was the fact that I decided to take on two final projects and turn in the one that got finished first, so all the work took twice as long. And since I was doing design work too, or at least design work that was meant for others, I spent much more time on that than I might have if I was designing to meet my own easily compromised standards.

The experience was great, though. There are definitely much easier ways to create a simple website than handcoding the whole thing, and I’m sure that had I had more experience with and knowledge of CSS I could have developed a style sheet that was better organized and made better use of the cascading. But eh, I think it’s good enough for a first attempt and as with anything, I’ll only get better with time.

It was a lot of fun to work on a project like this and it was very, very easy to start working and lose myself for hours and hours without meaning to, eventually awakening to the demands of my children and an amazingly stiff and aching body. I can see a lot of potential for this kind of work to become an enjoyable (and hopefully even lucrative) hobby, so I was inspired to begin acquiring the pieces to set up a much needed network in my house. Soon I will have my very own computer on my very own desk in my very own bedroom. Not that my children will ever allow me to use it, but I’ll remain optimistic that there might come a day.

Would you like to see the site? Here’s the site that existed before I started, and where I got most of the content. And here’s the site I created. I have to say that while I think it’s pretty enough, I don’t think it’s as good as I would have ideally liked. I hope I’ll be able to show you the other site I’m working on because that one is much prettier. I definitely felt restrained based on the type of site (informative versus commercial), as if an informative site needed to be plain with minimal graphics and couldn’t have the same kind of prettiness that a commercial site could have.

I learned so much during this first experience into developing a simple website. I think I did pretty well for my first time and I’m very excited to keep doing this work. After I finish the other site I’m working on, next up is designing my own theme for WordPress. That should be a piece of (yummy) cake and I’ll be so excited to polish up my site from this rough draft I never intended it to stay.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 11:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.