One of the first things I learned about web development is that you always have to have a site to play on, a place to try out new ideas and concepts, a place to hone your craft. For me, that site has always been my brother’s site, www.ericdsnider.com. So ever since I got serious about learning CSS, I have been itching to put it to use on Eric’s site.
Making such a switch on a huge site like Eric’s, though, is quite the endeavor. I haven’t been too extremely happy with the design lately, either, so I figured as long as I am making major changes, I might as well make major changes that people will see. So my friend Jerilyn and I began working on a new look to go along with our new, efficient website, and we came up with something we are pretty pleased with.
My other major issue now is that I have learned a lot in the three years since I did the PHP/MySQL programming on the site, so I know I can make that code more efficient, too. So I have been putting to use a lot of things that I haven’t used too extensively in the past, and while it is always a satisfying feeling to accomplish something big, it is also a lot of work.
The biggest satisfaction comes from the efficiency of the code. I took one page that used to be about 400 lines of code, and I got it down under 100 lines. Between the more efficient PHP code and the much more efficient XHTML and CSS, the site should load much more quickly and work much better. And that will make it worth all the time.