Inishowen Holiday Home Redesigned

I’m glad to announce that the Inishowen Holiday Home redesign has been completed.

I’m also glad to say that it passed the W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional test.

The header uses the Automatic Image Rotator script to display a random image on each page load – which is kind of snazzy :)

A bit of simple PHP code was used to determine which page was loaded and change the nav menu accordingly so visitors could tell which page they were on – not that it is really that neccessary!

Overall though, I’m pretty happy with the outcome :)

The Most Satisfaction?

While I enjoy most aspects of creating a website, the one part I enjoy the most is creating the initial design. I love tinkering about in Photoshop trying different colours, fonts, filters, and the likes.

I always feel good after I’ve completed a new design. I can’t say the same about coding. After I’m done coding a site/page I feel more relief than anything – relief that it’s done. But when I’m designing I’m always enthusiastic or excited. It’s a really nice feeling knowing you’ve created something new… fresh… never seen before.

What part of creating or running a website gives you the most satisfaction (not including the monetary aspect)? Is it creating the design or coding the HTML/CSS afterwards? What about search engine marketing or writing the content?

A HTML-Kit feature I never knew about!

While working on a site in HTML-Kit today I accidentally came across a feature that I really wish I knew about a long time ago.

I was happily coding away (oddly enough) in PHP and had highlighted a few lines of code that I wanted to move. Before I had the chance to move them I accidentally hit the tab button on the keyboard only to see all the highlighted lines get tabbed at once :eek:.

When I code in PHP I always indent the code like so:

if (isset($_POST['submit']))
{
	// do something
}
 else
{
	// do something else
}

I find it makes the code easier to read and easier to spot if I’m missing any closing brackets, etc.

Sometimes after I have written some code, I decide that I want to enclose it inside another statement or another loop. So I write the new statement or loop and then manually tab each line inside it so the code is formatted the way I like it. I’ve had to manually tab anywhere up to fifthy lines of code before. Not any more :D.

If only I had known about this feature a long time ago. It would have saved me a lot of time and frustration.

Advanced Bells & Whistles

Remember back to when you first learnt how to design web sites? Remember adding all those bells & whistles? I certainly do. Why did I add them? Because it seemed cool at the time.

The thing is… I’m still adding bells & whistles! Only now they’re more advanced bells & whistles.

Now that I know how to use the likes of Apache‘s mod_rewrite module or PHP‘s include function, I find myself wanting to make everything search engine friendly or use includes left, right and centre, when I should be keeping things simple. It’s a hard habit to break. When you know you can do something extra special – even though you probably don’t really need to – you find yourself doing it anyway… because it seems cool.

What’s worse is, these advanced bells & whistles can cause you more headaches than just keeping it simple.