web design

other, stories

After trying two commercial html editing programs, two commercial WYSIWYG programs (neither of which I actually bought, just “demo” tried), then both an open source editor and an open source WYSIWYG, right now notepad simply works best.

Regardless of the truth or lack of it in the matter, I do feel like I’ve made it, arrived at somewhere good.

Edit: Jan 19th, 2011
Thanks to a very kind donation, one of the commercial WYSIWYG is now “free” so to speak. At the moment it works best to do a sidebyside mix. This program to quickly arrange visual elements and do things I don’t know the syntax for, then notepad to scrub and polish it. Someday maybe I’ll be cool enough to work fastest straight up notepad.

other

Well, here it goes: this is my first whack at building a website.

Rough draft:

http://www.porchcoffee.org/lifeandhope/Home.html

The buttons don’t work (unless you’re an IE-user), there are no pages but the main page and the two boxes below the slideshow have absolutely zero format/style/font/zing/content. Ok Kelvin, fine, maybe it’s not absolutely zero, but it’s dang close. And with respect to being edgy, hip and cool (beautiful examples: Amnesty International, RED or Kiva), it’s simply not even an attempt.

But it’s a website, which is a new thing in dave world :). Also, for its audience the only need is easily available content. Once we here have made some orders-of-magnitude epic growth, then it’ll be time for a slick website to draw in more publicity and viewers. For now, I think it’s time to go eat a delicious two dollar lunch of carne asada, Guatemalan veggies and an orange.

Edit:
The buttons work now. Done son, wOOt, boomshicka-wow-wow and all that jazz, I’m pretty stoked that they work now. Apparently the slideshow div was messing with the button bar (?). A switch from relative positioning to absolute positioning did the trick. It’s probably a hack way of doing things (I don’t know enough about webpage code to even know if something’s hack or not, haha), and I don’t really understand why it worked, but it worked and (I’m pretty sure) it works in chrome and IE and firefox. Close enough.