Archive for March, 2007

This time, 3 weeks ago I was suffering from a massive crisis of confidence regarding my web development abilities, but this week the tables have turned and my confidence levels couldn’t be higher. Funny that.

I’ve always been happy to admit that while I’m not the best PHP programmer in the world, I am competent but, three weeks ago I was coming to the end of my tether whilst trying to write a small snippet of PHP code. the code was suppose to work out how accurately-matched certain pages within a CMS were to each other based upon the tags applied to them. I asked colleagues for advice which I got (but, couldn’t comprehend); I’d put the actual coding off while I thought about it for days; I’d written dozens of variants of a function for the task all of which didn’t quite work and came to a frustrating dead-end; I’d even drawn the problem out on paper in pseudo-code (numerous times) but nothing was working.

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Front-end development i.e. creating the XHTML/CSS for websites is my speciality. Yes, I also do PHP, MySQL and JavaScript but my heart lies with XHTML/CSS so much so that I’ve gotten to be quite good at it. Therefore, I thought it would be helpful to document how I typically go about creating the XHTML/CSS for a website.

In web design, I care most about the state of the (X)HTML, I like my sites to validate for a couple of reasons.

1. It makes creating/fixing CSS bugs easier
2. I just do

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A junior web developer often has a capability which in other professions is often reserved for exceptionally qualified individuals: the ability to completely fuck-up an entire business.

Many businesses are run completely online these days or their online presence is at least a major factor so anything that disrupts a website can be catastrophic. The very nature of the web, and how it works, means that it’s very easy when you’re making a change to a website to break the site completely.

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