I have seen CSS used all over the place, but have never bothered to even glance at it. It was just always there. Unfortunately it is an integral part of a website now so I had to learn it. I began my journey where I begin every journey…the Internet. Typically I learn new languages entirely on the Internet. I love my books though so after I learn what I need to know I spend a bunch of money on books about the language…without learning anything new. I just have to have the books though. It is also nicer to grab a book, turn it to the page you need, and use that as a reference, rather than switch to a web browser and try to remember which website has the best writeup of x feature that you don’t exactly remember the specifics of. One of these days I’ll get a dual LCD setup.

Luckily CSS has great Internet references, the most useful is at W3Schools. However, to figure out exactly what I can do with CSS and how to do it I read some articles at A list apart and Eric Meyer’s css/edge. Eric Meyer is where I got the idea for the & symbol in the background throughout the site. I visited the the css zen garden and thought to myself, “I guess this is a pretty page.” Then I looked elsewhere, completely missing the point of the site. That is until I was rummaging around at Barnes & Nobles and came across The Zen of CSS Design.

I didn’t really know how I wanted my site to look and reading The Zen of CSS Design was amazing. It doesn’t exactly teach you CSS, but it shows tons of examples of how to use it. The way it presented the information was perfect and I ended up learning most of what I know about CSS from it. It also explains a lot of aspects of web design beyond CSS: contrast, minimalism, how to make a good user interface, browser hacks, etc. Most importantly it is full of ideas and inspiration. After you read it it makes a beautiful coffee table book.

Now I am no artist, in fact I am horrible at pretty much anything artistic (this includes writing). The art on this site basically consisted of typing the & symbol into Photoshop and changing the colors. This was something my limited artistic talent could do and I think it turned out well. It is a little busier than most blogs that I like to read. I am definitely prone to read an extremely simply looking blogs. White page, black text over a plain unobtrusive background and a busy side bar that I usually ignore, but I like the way & symbol looks. Most people read blogs through RSS now anyways.

There are still a lot of things I don’t like about the site, but most of it has to do with the way the pages interact with each other, not the design. This site is also entirely geared towards Opera/Firefox. I have barely glanced at it in IE. Unless I decide that I can somehow make a profit on this site or the information here is so interesting and useful everyone should have access to it, I probably won’t worry about how it looks in IE, people shouldn’t be using it anyways. I may even put a redirection page at the beginning that says the site won’t work in IE and you should download Opera, regardless of whether it works in IE or not. Sort of revenge for all the Firefox/IE sites that don’t support Opera (even though Opera works fine in most of them).

I’m sure I will fiddle with the css and design more. Especially as I start learning more about Wordpress. The beauty of CSS is I can leave the page the same and them simply add new style sheets to give it a completely different look, so at some point I may create alternate CSS designs (perhaps a ’simpler’ design for people to use). I am definitely a fan of CSS now.

I am definitely interested in what other people think about it though, so send me your critism.