This is why I love programming -- and the programming community, warts and all. Tiffany's an Environmental Science major who had a month of free time so she decided to learn how to make web pages. That's the same way I started (albeit as an English major), and the cocktail of instant feedback and ease of discovery kept me as a happy addict of the command line ever since.<p>To me, accessibility and approachability are two of the most important tenets of any discipline. I think it's important that we make sure there are more Tiffanies and less stories of overharsh criticism (eg. <a href="http://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/" rel="nofollow">http://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/</a>)<p>You might not think that everyone should learn how to program, and that's okay, I agree with you -- but at the very least, I think people should have the ability to learn what they want to learn, as ably and quickly as possible.
If I were an employer, I would be more impressed with the way the author responded to feedback/criticism and was able to improve her site on future iterations more so than I'd be impressed with the site itself (although it looks great).
"Nobody has time for my fancy "overflow: scroll;" in a 600 x 600px box"<p>Seriously, with this one insight the author is ahead of a good third of the professional web designers out there.
Hi everyone, sorry it went down for a few minutes. I was hosting it on Dropbox but turns out that's not a good idea for HN traffic, so I switched to using a copy of it. Thanks for reading :)
Not bad. First design revision looks like back when css round corners and opacity became usable. Next one looks like the usual "I'm a designer" design. The grey one reminds me of Yahoo's early days when grey backgrounds were popular. The the last one is minimal and clean, so rather modern. Not a big fan of this particular green though.<p>I think it's great when people work with the feedback they get and decide to act on it.<p>I have to admit though I was a little surprised this post was about simple frontend design/HTML/CSS, I was expecting something more... techy.
> My first reaction was "WHO RIGHT CLICKED 'VIEW PAGE SOURCE'??? WHO DOES THAT???"<p>People with too much time on their hands I guess. There's a phenomenon (that I subscribe to) that includes helping people by pointing out mistakes (since humans learn by making mistakes) but often not providing guidance. Not providing guidance forces the person who made the mistake, to think about it and then fix it in their own way.<p>Its not the kindest form of helping, but its pretty darn effective.
A lovely read, but I must say, that last line gave me a little adrenaline rush.<p>What seemed like a first timer progressing, giving you the ahh, how cute (like a cat video), all ended for me on the last line, where she addressed me with my first name.<p>I immediately assumed it was someone who had used a facebook/google 0-day to get profile information and show off at the end, hitting you while you were at ease, reading this lovely progression... until I continued to read and figured she just had a friend called Nick :P Guess I'm to paranoid for the internet :)
Well, I made my first site in those days too and I know how you feel! It's really a joy when you make your first one and I know the pain that you feel when you are at the beginning!
I don't understand the problem with the <center> tag. It does the job and even though its deprecated its a long way away from being unsupported.
Am I the only person who wished she had kept the patterned background? I thought it was profoundly refreshing after years and years of smooth and flat design.<p>The thing is, finely textured backgrounds have been slowly creeping back into the web design world for some time now after the collapse of the organic noise craze touched off by Apple's popularization of the linen background. It's time for some coarse patterns!
I feel like my personal site should reject all current web design practice and just have Times with the occasional {h1} black on #ccc with #00f links. You'll never come up to the standard people expect in this world of ajax, tumblr and css3, so why not just do it CERN and Netscape style?<p>Dark green on yellow is actually the easiest to read, but that's garish.
> For about 15 minutes, I thought about keeping it the way it was since it was practical and straightforward, but I couldn't. Every time I looked at it I felt the urge to throw my computer out the window cause it was so UGLY.<p>Sad to see another soul giving in to the temptation of "over-designing" things. For fuck's sake, what's wrong with light text on a white/gray backgrounds? She could've tweaked the fonts, spacing and colors a bit, but people no longer do that these days, instead she went full steam and <i>overdesigned</i> the shit out of it and it still looks bad.<p>...she could've learn a bit of Javascript and called herself a programmer instead of masturbating with CSS and posting about it on Facebook.<p>If you're not a designer, don't overdo design because you're not gonna do it well! If you are a designer, just stop when it looks "good enough" and start working on something more interesting than a bloody website design! We're wasting waaay too much of our lives "designing" stuff, whether it's our garden or a blog, instead of actually <i>putting things and information in order</i> (no, just "search" is no good enough though I guess some day I'll be able to google for my keys) or actually <i>building cool new things!</i>
Does anyone know of that Adobe post and JS script to equalize the line length of text for aesthetic purposes? I remember if one line was full div width and the next line was only a couple words, it would insert line breaks to try to make both lines closer in width to one another.
I highly recommend you check out Bootstrap[0], especially since their recently released version is mobile first.<p>[0] <a href="http://getbootstrap.com/getting-started/" rel="nofollow">http://getbootstrap.com/getting-started/</a>
Great work iterating! Keep it up.<p>You might consider changing your banner's background color to something more "minty" like #45E488. It seems more you<i>.<p></i> As someone who has never met you, I feel 100% qualified to say this.
It's a nice site for a non programmer although the font hurts my eyes a bit. Her server host must be thrilled now that her site probably overloaded their box with requests.