I now have my very first web page up and running!  So far it’s only the crafts subdirectory page, but it’s tremendously exciting to me – it’s a proof that the template I so carefully built works, and an opportunity to rewrite and reorganize the section, as I had intended (but never got to).  So I am excited.

If you are interested in watching the progress of the site, btw, it’s up at redesign.travelingtiger.com.  (I created a subdomain of travelingtiger.com as a sort of staging server.  Most of the links are not working yet (the only one that works is the image map of “crafts” on the homepage), nor is the top left sidebar – still need to figure out where the links will go and create dummy files.  Also need to choose fonts for the text (don’t really like the default Arial), and a host of other minor details. But it is definitely starting to take shape.

Conclusion from all of this: Web design is FUN!  I should have tried this earlier.

I have finished coding the redesigned homepage, and have successfully created another of my page templates (took much fiddling, but finally completed).  I still have some fine-tuning to do, and some links to add, but the layout is basically there.  And I have learned a lot about CSS in the process.

Now I have to redo my (HTML-based) gallery template, figure out how to do a Flash-based gallery (for the prettier version), and redo my blog template.  The Flash-based gallery I expect to be quite a challenge, as my memory of Flash is pretty rusty and I am trying to do some complex work (a draggable filmstrip at the bottom, for example, and automatic loading of images through an XML file).  But one thing at a time: I’m going to finish the HTML templates before tackling Flash.

I have also discovered, much to my relief, that instead of needing a new web hosting account for my staging server, I can create a subdomain of travelingtiger.com to store all the files, and presumably migrate them over to the main site eventually.

I think what I will do is get the templates, the directory structure, and the main pages done myself (which will probably still take a good couple of weeks), then hire someone in India to do the rote HTML work of migrating the gallery pages.  All assuming I don’t figure out how to automate the process.

On another front, I have started threading up the loom for the painted warp.  It will probably take quite awhile, as I have over 1400 threads (a bit over 23″ at 60 epi) and most of my time is being spent coding up the new website.

I still need to correct one style issue (the washed-out photo of me appears above, not below, the text on the page), but here it is, so far (with filler text). There are no active links on the page, but the three photos to the left will be links to featured sections (textiles, travels, blog), and the nav bar on the right will be the other links (the actual links are still TBD; the text is just a placeholder).

Still not sure how I feel about the new design. My mom says she likes the original homepage better – this one is too busy. I think I tend to agree with her – I’d prefer something more pictorial than text-oriented. I have an interesting idea for photos in a spiral on the screen, with the links in the photos and the final (biggest) photo being of me, but don’t know if it will fit in with the rest of the design’s “look and feel” – I will try playing around with Photoshop this evening and seeing whether I come up with something I like.

Nonetheless, I’m encouraged. This was not easy to implement – I had to learn a LOT about CSS positioning in order to get it to work. So I am learning a lot, which is the main thing.

Next step: explore new design options in Photoshop, and talk to some of my developer friends about whether a content management system like Drupal would make site updates/rearrangements easier.

After two frustrating-yet-exciting days spent with Dreamweaver and Photoshop, I am finally making progress. It turns out that my new web page layout is fairly complex, involving three columns (two overlapping, which gets complicated) and quite a bit of image reprocessing. But I have figured out how to do it, and have happily been working away in Photoshop to create the necessary images. (It turns out that there is actually quite a bit of work to be done with the images, too – more than I expected, and I’ve had to redo some of the images three or four times over as I figure out how to create the files, what file formats to use, etc. I never really appreciated the difference between .jpg, .gif, and .png before!)

All that aside, I think I should still be able to finish the homepage by end of this week. So that’s what I’ll be working on. After that it should go much quicker, though I’ll have a lot of work to do to come back and clean up the homepage template file. My objective is to do it as cleanly as possible, and that involves moving a lot of the formatting into a separate CSS stylesheet. This isn’t just about getting the homepage looking right – it’s also about mastering the techniques.

Once I get all the templates ready and do a couple of test pages to make sure it works, I will probably hire someone on oDesk to do the actual migration of files into the site.  I anticipate that the whole project will probably take four or five weeks for me to complete, and another four or five weeks for someone else to do the migration into the new template (I have a LOT of pages -and images – to migrate).

What fun!  I’m learning a lot and enjoying myself a lot.  Sure, it’s frustrating when things don’t work, but it feels SO good when you finally figure it out!