So. 51 days into the redesign, and where am I at?
It’s going pretty well, actually. I’ve converted all of the pages except the photo galleries to the new (provisional) design, and even those should be done very soon. That’s the easy part. Now that I’ve got the styles in place, I’ll be able to shuffle things around much more easily. CSS-based layouts are a godsend, they are. I’ve still got a lot to learn (no duh), but it doesn’t look so intimidating anymore. At first, I was going to stick to my trusty old table-based layout; but when I tried to get a little fancier I ended up with massively nested tables, so I said “Fuck that noise!†and took the plunge. CSS all the way, baby. Haven’t looked back since. In fact, a while later, I decided to move the sidebar from left to right. All it took were a few changes in the stylesheet, and boom, all my pages had their sidebar on the right. Seriously, how awesome is that? If I hadn’t been enlightened before, that would have done it for sure.
But like I said, that’s the easy part. CSS and HTML, that’s just… coding (I always code my pages by hand). The real struggle will be designing graphics, because it means using a side of my brain that just hasn’t gotten much exercise. Left brain—analytical, logical, language oriented? No problemo. Right brain—intuitive, emotional? Ah. That’s a problemo. I’ll need to learn a whole new language. No, not even that (just showed my bias, right there), but much more basic—primal, if I may use the word—ways to express myself.
I think I got that particular revelation while visiting Web sites on Paleolithic art a couple weeks ago. The people living 20 or 30,000 years ago had no written language, and maybe not much of a spoken language, but they still produced some seriously kick-ass art. I have to watch myself here; can’t fall in the trap of thinking “Ooo, Cro-magnons were primitive and brutish, they had no left-brain thinking at all.†Which, well, is certainly very condescending and probably very wrong. But they must have had a very different mindset, and that’s something I need to explore.