Graeme Pirie

Re-Design Lessons

As I was re-designing this site, it was a fairly straightforward process. I cracked open Photoshop and had a wee play with it until I had a layout that I was happy with and appreciated. Once this phase was completed, the next stage was to begin coding to take it from a photoshop image to a fully functioning website. For this I downloaded the excellent Starkers Theme for Wordpress by Elliot Jay Stocks and got stuck in amongst the CSS and PHP until it was looking and working as I wanted it to.

Now my browser of choice is Mozilla Firefox and as such this was what I used to check on the progress of the site build as I coded away in my own little world. After I had finished coding and it was looking as I wanted it to I was finished. Done. Complete.

Or so I thought.

But as all us web designers know, there are many different browsers and each have different ways of rendering websites, and as such my work was far from done. Most modern browsers are very similar in the way that they render sites but the exception to the rule is Internet Explorer, although the upcoming 8th version is much more in line with the likes of Firefox and Safari. Earlier versions of Internet Explorer such as IE 7 and in particular IE 6 are the versions which cause the most gnashing of teeth and banging of heads amongst the web design community, and I was no exception. The site renders slightly different in IE and although it doesn’t have to look exactly the same in all browsers, there are things that I still need to iron out. These will be resolved in the next few days as I fit it around my Uni work and other commitments, but the best part of this process has been the learning curve that re-designing and launching this site has provided.

I feel that I’m learning more by doing tasks like this as opposed to just reading about how to build a wordpress theme or de-bug IE 6. Yes there is reading involved on forums and blogs to learn how to iron out the wee issues with launching a site but I’ve learnt far more from doing it as well as reading about it.

The site isn’t how it should be in IE6 and IE7 as yet and I’m working hard to iron out these wee bugs as soon as possible, and in hindsight this should have been completed before launching. However, I admit that I got a bit excited and carried away and launched a bit prematurely.

That’s something else that was added to the learning curve.