Everything Sucks

I have just decided that I am going to expand my knowledge by reading about how sucky everything is.

I was going on another mental tirade about how HTML and CSS sucks. How it SHOULDN'T be so difficult to lay out front end elements. And there shouldn't be so many dang brackets and other code elements. So tedious. Anyway. I decided to search the webs to see if this sentiment is shared by anyone or if I just don't know what I'm talking about. Turns out it's the latter.

In my searching I found some really great articles that taught me a lot through other people's gripes. What a fun and entertaining way to learn more about topics I'm already somewhat familiar with. By calling out pain points and bad practices I can learn not only what to avoid and what to do instead, but why.

Gutting WP

I'm working on a website designed to show off my designs as well as the designs of others. I can promote designers I admire and share cool art, resources, architecture, anything cool I find online. My goal is to build traffic through networking.

I began the site as a fully hand coded website, from scratch. To deal with dynamic elements I was going to create a WordPress blog and read the posts as JSON. I got it working perfectly... until I uploaded it. Then I hit the dreaded cross domain limitation. After wrestling with this for a while I decided to bite the bullet and make my site fully WP. BUT I grabbed a completely bare bones theme as a starting point. It was pretty much style-less. So it was a perfect choice.

I've gutted the templates and ported over what I had coded. Then I used WP methods to populate portions of my site from pages or specific category posts. It still has issues, and the look is weak, but the back end is nearly complete.

http://norman.atwebpages.com/

Design

I am obsessing over design lately. I would love to design watches, furniture, architecture. Sad that my interest in it came 20+ years after art school. But I'm thinking about exploring it any way. My plan is to put together a site. Its objective is to get exposure for my designs. To do so I'll try networking by highlighting other peoples' work and designs I like.

Even if it does nothing for my design ambitions it will be a good place to showcase my various creative projects.

Due to the power of the platform I think I'll start out using WordPress. Later I want to move it over to something I've built from the ground up but for now WP will be fine.