Friday, December 18, 2009

Planning to re-design my website using just CSS

When I became a freelancer more than a year ago, one of the first things I did was to build and deploy my own website.

Back then, I knew basic HTML, but CSS was pretty new to me. What better way to get to know it than with a real project! I’ve read a couple of books and websites and managed to get things done and I’m quite happy with the results from a coding perspective.

Now that I’m starting to talk to a few more people in my network, there are some new people looking at the site. An old colleague/boss remarked recently that it looked like a school project.  Touche!

So I looked a bit around for a new design. One inspiration was a friend’s design for PowerPoint slides. As I also plan to add a “business blog” to my site, I’ve looked into wordpress as blogging platform and some of the more common templates. I’ve picked a good looking template and did some changes to it, so between those two inspirations, I’ve got a baseline.

Here’s a quick mockup:

Website Mockup

Depending on how well I developed the site last year, I managed to split content and structure (in the HTML) and presentation (in the CSS). I hope to get almost all of the changes done just by changing the CSS. My goal is to do minimal changes to HTML (apart from adding maybe a class or id here and there). It’ll be interesting to see how much I’ll be able to do and I’ll post some lessons learned in this blog.

Have you tried similar things? Let me know in the comments or send me an email!

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