Tuesday, May 25, 2010

So apparently I'm a web developer now

I am now doing something that I quite honestly never wanted to do: coding.

I am currently working on my company's two web sites: http://mynewlifetoday.com/ and http://ufcf.net/. mnlt.com is running on a Drupal CMS, while ufcf.net is using straight-forward php. Now I didn't actually do the design on either side. The former was an adaptation of a Drupal template, and the latter was done by a graphic artist at our company. What I am doing is upgrading the functionality and usability of both.

First off, my entire wealth of web site design knowledge 6 months ago was gathered during HTML2.0. I knew nothing about XHTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, AJAX, or any CMS. I have basically been learning as I go.

The work on mnlt.com is to try and make it more intuitive and user-friendly. As anyone that's worked with Drupal knows, it's incredibly powerful but not the prettiest stuff out there. Formatting things so that the average user, and in this case children, can use it is a bit of a challenge. I know what I would like it to do. I just don't know how to implement it yet.

ufcf.net is a lot simpler. I took it from what was a static html one-pager to a multi-page site. I then changed it to php so I could call the individual content pages from a single index file. The next step will be to add a database back-end and a way for users to submit their own content.