Jer's Site Design

jcraner.com

Site Design

This site design is a work in progress. As I said on the home page, the idea for the design was to make it more free-form and less blocky than your average web site. Easier said than done... but it's fun to try. (I can make little text bubbles, but I can't just plop them down anywhere on the screen.)

This design was partly inspired by CSS Zen Garden. It's cool how they can change the entire look and layout of their page (within limits, of course) by swapping out style sheets. I want to try that with this site. Only problem is I'm not a graphic artist, so the styles will probably be pretty simple.

Here's a list of the tools I have used on this site:

Text (HTML/CSS): Notepad (yeah baby!)

Graphics: MS Paint, MS Word, IrfanView

Some of the techniques I use are adapted (or out-right stolen) from people's CSS demo pages. Here's a list of references:

CSS rounded corners: This is basically stolen from http://www.vertexwerks.com/tests/sidebox/ with only slight tweaking. But my graphics took a while to draw in MS Paint... :)

CSS image rollover: This was adapted from http://www.redmelon.net/tstme/roll/. I tried a lot of versions of it using text underneath the images, but couldn't get it to look right consistently. So now the text labels are part of the images.