It allowed me to change the colors and some minor things on my blog without doing too much work. Now…a gray background. AND BLUE!

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…is that the majority of e-mail programs lack support for CSS.

Please support the E-mail Standards Project.

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While most of you read my blog through the tasty RSS feed, there are still a few out there that prefer it in all its beauty in a browser. Those of you who go to the site are in for a treat.

I’ve been wanting to create my own Wordpress theme for a long time, but I’ve always been terrified of breaking the three years of blogging backlog I’ve got, so I never tackled it. Then Travis recently took a crack at it and he said it was easy. Now, granted, he is a genius. However, I was intrigued and I’ve been wanting to customize my site ever since. I am, after all, a web designer by trade.

So I mocked up what I liked in Photoshop and coded the XHTML. Then, I used an existing theme to try and figure out the nuances of Wordpress and PHP. I managed to figure most of it out and for the last 6 or 8 hours have been working diligently to get it up and running.

There’s no doubt that it’s buggy and I’ve missed plenty of stuff, but for now…it works.

As for the pink - you’ll notice that the design is rather dark…the only color coming from splashes of pink. I’ve decided that to raise awareness for Breast Cancer Awareness month. In addition, the darkness of the site is actually BETTER for the environment because monitors do not have to work as hard to display black. So in “going pink”, I’m also “going green”.

I’m planning on putting in a CSS switcher that will allow you to customize your colors to an extent, but that’s down the road. For now, I must say I’m pretty proud of myself for not breaking it. Sure there will be growing pains, but the fact that I managed to create a widget-ready theme in a night…well, that just makes my header all the more true.

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Designing with Web Standards
by Jeffrey Zeldman
RATING: 8 out of 10

Ever since I became a web designer, people have been telling me to read this book. DWWS is considered by many to be the seminal tome on how to design sites using CSS, XHTML and a collection of standards set forth by the W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium).

Since I’m a self-taught designer, I am always anxious to read anything that will help me to become better at my job. Thanks to my good friend, Kevin, I didn’t have to buy this book or go to a so-called “library” to pick it up. He had a copy of the newly released second edition for me to borrow.

I’ve been reading this book for what seems like ages and I haven’t breezed through it, but that’s not because it’s a bad book. It’s a great book, in fact. Other things have been going on that have put my reading at a snail’s pace. Plus, I haven’t exactly been diligent about getting into the gym (where I do most of my reading). If I had, I would have finished this book and at least one other by now.

So to the book: Zeldman is a former-copywriter-turned-designer who has literally written the book on the latest revolution in web design, which is to part with presentation, table-based designs in favor of semantic design that separates presentation from structure. Using the suggestions put forth by Zeldman is better for the Internet. It saves bandwidth and ensures that your web sites play well in all browsers.

Zeldman is a great writer and he makes this topic understandable and interesting. Not only that, but he gives you the reasons why it is important, which books sometimes forget to do.

DWWS is a very grood book and I suggest it to anyone who designs web sites. I also suggest reading his personal web site and his side project, A List Apart.

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