An "Aha" Moment

Let me make this clear: I'm a writer, not a coder. Not a designer. Nevertheless, yesterday I eagerly pressed F12 to launch a simulation of the new StopBSL.com website, anticipating a few minor bugs, but nothing major.

The sidebars were too wide. The body, containing the text, was too narrow. I scratched my head.

So I launched the site in Firefox and Netscape. Now it looked great. I scratched my head again.

I combed through the Dreamweaver code. Misplaced tag? Wrong table width somewhere? But it looked fine.

I launched the site in Explorer again. The columns were still all wonky. I stared. (Explorer has a reputation for needing "special treatment" in page code, but since it's the most common browser, no site designer in their right mind would ignore problems that show up in Explorer.)

I fiddled in Dreamweaver, scooting tables and boxes around, inserting spacers. Relaunch. This time, if anything, the columns were even more messed up. I started to curse.

Figuring I had a corrupt chunk of code somewhere screwing the whole thing up, I rebuilt the template from scratch. An hour later, I relaunched.

Now the text was smashed into such a narrow space that it was virtually unreadable, while the rest of the page was a sea of white. I threw a book against the wall before digging into the code yet again.

Four hours later, I had dug myself into a pit so deep that I was in a very dark place indeed. The site design was a wreck.

"Why the hell can't this be as easy as my blogs?" I shrieked.

And that's when I had an "aha" moment.

Blogs: easy to write, easy to update, easy to expand, and no design skills required.

I spent today populating the new blog-site with the text from the ruined site. Want a sneak peek? http://stopbsl.wordpress.com/

No, no, don't change your bookmarks and links. When I'm ready, I'll just redirect the StopBSL.com servers to point to the WordPress site. So when you visit http://www.stopbsl.com/, you'll see the blog-site at that address.

Heck yeah I'm a genius.

/dance