• website design thoughts

i like to consider myself an amateur web designer. ever since my (then) 13 year old little sister, who at the time had been making personal websites for a while, sat down with me and told me all the fascinating secrets of the "a href" and "img src" codes, i've been engaging myself in web design. i started with a small personal site that eventually became loish.net, although the original version was just awful. i don't even know what the point of it was. it probably had some art on it and a stupid "blog" with random observations in it, plus probably some sections with photos of my room. just a personal site, i guess. i changed my layout like every 3 days back then because i was so excited about my newly attained layout skills, which consisted of using absolute positioning for everything and employing the use of excessively tiny iframes.

in recent years i have been trying to move in a more professional direction. although i still have a preference for making sites that are more decorative than functional, i try to suppress this and consider the situation of the website visitor. for this reason my boyfriend finally forced me to learn dreamweaver (believe me, typing a site in notepad is very limiting in some senses) and i installed simpleviewer for gallery viewing. i am nowhere near actually having that perfect dream website i want yet - one that is a harmony between user-friendliness and the decorative elements that reflect my artwork - but i'm trying to slowly move in that direction.

there's just ONE THING that keeps frustrating me and getting in my way! one thing that just drives me crazy and ruins the experience for me! and that's making a site that works for all screen resolutions. i hate this!!! i want to have a website that fills up the screen just right. not one that looks empty and stretched out on a big screen or cramped and little on a small screen. but so far i just haven't found a way for me. (simple websites pull it off very well but i'm not quite ready to have a really simple layout.) i was really happy with my current website design until i found out that a huge portion of the visitors have a 1024x768 resolution screen (not just via the recent poll, but also google analytics). and my layout just doesn't look good at that resolution. frustrating!

guess i'll be investing some more time into browsing attractive sites to find inspiration for the next layout which will hopefully work a bit better than the current one.

that's all i have to say, hope everyone had a good easter!