Progress Made on Website Design

After many nights of eye strained toiling, I am here to report that I have made a significant amount of progress on the new design of my website, www.somaevets.com. A few months ago I decided that I wanted to streamline the site by rebuilding it from the ground, or I should say the code, on up. My goal was to build the basic structure with hand-coded HTML files and employ CSS to control the layout. Before I started, I knew a little bit of HTML, and I had a vague understanding of CSS. I felt that I had a grasp on the basic principles, but the only way I would really learn it was by jumping in and doing it. I checked out a dozen different books from the library, and I went over scores of tutorials online.

There was an overwhelming amount of information out there, and I quickly discovered that it fell into two categories:

1. Lessons aimed at absolute beginners, which consisted of a sleuth of "Hello World" and "this is my first website" tutorials.
2. Advanced techniques intended for experts and programming jargon that went way over my head.

I was stuck in the middle, and my biggest challenge was figuring out where to find relevant information. Like I said, there was tons of stuff out there, but it was enough of a task sifting through it to find what I needed. In the end, I found that the best way to learn was by looking at the code of websites that stumbled into as I surfed. Whenever I found something interesting, I viewed the source code in order to determine what made it tick, and then I would play around in TextEdit and attempt to construct something based on what I learned. I added web-developer tools to Firefox in order to help break down the code even further, and somewhere down the line it all started to click.

It took a while for the project to get up off the ground, but the momentum really built this past week. I anticipate launching the final product next week, with a possible beta launch by the end of this week. That's enough for now... back to the grind.