LittleWyvern.com

Today is Day 21 of my P90X experience. Three weeks, baby! Twenty one consecutive days without skipping a workout. As of yesterday I am down about four pounds and, more importantly, three percent body fat. It’s a start…

Twenty one days down; sixty nine days to go.

I have been keeping pretty busy at work lately, spending my past two weeks working with our Development (fund-raising) team to build a website for an upcoming event with the Miss Universe pageant.

You can see the website that I built right here.

Meh… it’s ok I guess.

I also put together a very simple landing page – click here – to tie the various fund-raising events together (also, meh).

Everyone here seems to really love the sites – which is awesome – but I feel like that is more a reflection on their own low expectations than the quality of my delivery. To see what I mean, go to that events page and click on the links for “Season 4 a Cure Cancer Run” or “Viva Bike Vegas” to see what NVCI had been using before they hired me.

As uninspired as my own pages may be, they are still a clear upgrade from the HTML 1.0 embarrassment of our previous work. It is tough to sell potential donors on cutting edge cancer research when your website is helplessly trapped in 1997.

And while my bosses and co-workers are all thoroughly impressed by my thoroughly average display of digital creation, on my next site I really want to do better. My strengths have always been in constructing the code behind the page, not the look and layout of the page itself. As a web development team of one, my job here – and personal sense of pride – demands that I shore up these weaknesses. I continue to get better with CSS and document construction, but I don’t have a particularly good eye for aesthetics. As you can see from the two pages linked above, I have a dirty love affair with rectangular boxes. I am also a sucker for hard horizontal lines. The end result is inevitably – and predictably – a brutish and block-y feel.

Anyways, I just bought a bunch of books that will hopefully help me to get better at the design aspect of web development. I learned the lesson with FantasyBlueBook that even the most useful website becomes worthless when saddled with a bad user interface. I don’t expect to ever become a graphical wizard, but hopefully by learning more about design I can make some strides in the right direction.

Oh, and if you are going to be in Las Vegas on August 14th you should come out to the Miss Universe Gift Auction! Hanging out with really hot girls while helping us raise money towards curing cancer… sounds like a pretty solid night.

Web Standards Solutions : Markup and Style Handbook
Dan Cederholm

Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
Robert Hoekman Jr

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Steve Krug

Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works
Janice Redish

The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web
Dave Shea