I mentioned in my last post that I’d designed a basic website using nothing but MS Paint and Notepad. To expand upon that, the site is PHP driven, the only reason for that is I wanted to make the entire thing modular, as such the site is broken down into the following files:
header.php
menu.php
page.php
footer.php
Where page.php is actually index.php, photos.php, etc. depending on the page you’re accessing and it includes the call functions for header.php, menu.php, and footer.php (in that order). That way if I want to add a link to the menu I can just edit menu.php and have the entire site update automatically.
The site currently uses 14 CSS classes, the main reasons it takes so many is the menu formatting and the additional classes for skinning the RSS feed from FeedBurner. If I end up using the template for longer than a few weeks I may try and cut down on the style sheet size just a bit.
Oh, and the site is actually written in 100% valid XHTML!
I do a fair amount of web design, I don’t think I’m amazing at it, but I also don’t suck. But here’s the thing, while I can design a good looking website, there’s only so much I can do to code sweet features. I have a basic understanding of PHP, a splash of Javascript, and a good handle on CSS, but I certainly have my limits.
