bekahcubed v.6

It’s been a while since I last updated my site. The current version (v.5) was created in early 2006. But even that is a bit deceptive. While I have made changes to the organization and content of the site in progressive updates, I have not updated the layout since v.3–in 2002.

So, a bit has changed since 2002 when I was last doing layouts. Using tables for formatting was standard then–and CSS was new. Now CSS is the only way to go. I learned rudimentary CSS for v.3–and used it for font attributes, backgrounds, etc.–but I still have a lot to learn. CSS Layouts require a special attention to nesting and organization of elements that I wasn’t used to in my earlier days.

And then there’s the browser problem. None of the popular web browsers are completely compliant with the W3C standards for CSS. So I created my template testing against Firefox (the most standards compliant web browser–you should consider switching to it if you haven’t already). Once I had the look I wanted in Firefox, I opened it in Microsoft Internet Explorer 7–and got a page with layout elements stacked on top of each other every which way. IE7 ignored my directions for specifying “heading” headers and “body” headers and instead stacked all of my headers in absolute position at the top of the screen–not exactly what I was going for. So I had to tweak my code to work around IE7’s issues.

You can take a look at my template page (with a little text pulled from my “pregnancy” file. Don’t freak out–I’m very interested in midwifery and doulas and the like–but I am certainly not about to become an unwed mother.) I’m not even bothering with tweaking for earlier versions of IE or other less common web browsers–unless a reader points out a difficulty. So let me know via comments or e-mail if you have problems viewing the template.

I have not started using v.6 yet because I’m doing more than just a layout change–I’m updating my offerings a bit, and working to make my code generally more compliant and user-friendly. For example, I have been “blogging” in one long paragraph that fills the entire page–using breaks for divisions between paragraphs you read and bold formatting for headers. Version 6 will use headers and paragraph code as they’re supposed to be used–hopefully making bot catalogueing and regular browsing a bit easier. I’ll also be translating all my code into XHTML compliant code. So I have to do a bit of copying and pasting and tweaking code for individual pages.

So, for now, enjoy the sneak preview, prepare for v.6 to launch within a month or so, and thank God that you didn’t decide to prepare your website manually!