I’m in the process of setting up a second blog – not a replacement for this one, but a blog I will write in addition to this one. I’ve done it before… as many of you remember, from April to December of last year I had a second blog, then gave it up. This new blog will be a better, bigger deal than the last one.
For all my new blogs, I want to use the WordPress publishing engine. So I’ve been working through a tutorial explaining how to create WordPress themes and templates (those are what give a blog its unique look). As they were laying out the table using CSS, they commented, “Of course, no competent web designer would lay out a site using HTML tables, which should be used only for tabular data.”
Uh-oh. I’ve created some nice looking sites over the past two years – for example, TradiantCAD.com and the redesign of my grade calculator. But those sites were laid out using HTML tables.
Sounds like I’m incompetent.
Sounds like I need a crash course in CSS, before I even bother with WordPress and its templates and themes. I’ve tried converting existing sites from tables to the CSS model, but the “float” tag and some other CSS elements remain a mystery.
I’m not giving up though. If I got through college having had to pass Calculus III at 8 in the morning, surely I can get this. If I got through grad school programming in languages like Ada which have the most f-d up syntax this side of Mars, surely I can get this.
Tomorrow I’m going to search Amazon for good books on CSS, then go to Bookstar on my lunch break and buy the one that looks the best. I’ll pay about $10 extra not ordering it from Amazon, but I’m too impatient to wait for it to be shipped.