Woes and Web Development

Alright lets talk web design.   My class mates and myself have been learning (struggling) to make a simple CSS style for a pre-coded html template, and it’s been hell, but we’re learning a ton. Going into our interface design course I had a very vague notion of how websites are put together.  I envisioned an easy drag and drop interface; just plop your images wherever you like, and format your text just like in Indesign.   This is not the case, not even close. The process is so different from the design work its staggering.  I believe a big portion of it is the poor tools  given to us to make it.  Dreamweaver is ironically named because it causes nothing but nightmares.  Though our instruction has been to use Dreamweaver for the project, it is just too buggy to be useful.  Its easy to change values but the display features don’t show you what your doing.  Its equivalent to laying out a magazine spread with a blindfold on.  So now I’m using the Firefox downloaded developer tools along with firebug to display as well as finding out which CSS rules are targeting what because Dreamweaver doesn’t make it clear.  I imagine this is closer to what actual web designers do.  Although I’ve got a lot of complaints my page is fairly close to my originally intended photoshop file. So I’m sure with some practice and patience I’ll get the hang of it. Here’s a side by side of what I intended and what I actually got:

Example of Intended

Actual

Though this whole process hasn’t been worthless, its been a ton of frustration but I’m enjoying it. I’ll definitely carry on with web design, I’m just going to work in Kompozer or some other Dreamweaver alternative.

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