Will Work For Free (& Without Food)

I didn't have anything better to do with my time (if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you), so this past Saturday I thought I'd do a little work for free. I volunteer as the webmaster/IT guru for an organization of young Stanford alumni in the greater Bay Area, and our website was in need of a redesign. So I sat down on Saturday morning with the intention of creating some design comps in Illustrator to bring to the next meeting. Well, one thing led to another and before I knew it I had tumbled headlong into a full-fledged redesign of the website. Some 15 hours later it was finished — a completely new website, redone from the ground up. Take a look at the finished product. As I mentioned, I had no intentions of doing a complete redesign on Saturday, but I got so into my work that I became a little carried away. In fact, I was so engrossed that I actually forgot to eat. Come to think of it, I might not even have gotten out of my chair more than once or twice the whole day. Some may call this amazing focus and dedication, but I think it's probably just stupid. I just wish I had that kind of endurance at my day job. For those of you who care, the redesigned site is done entirely in CSS (no tables!), and it's valid (although the validator doesn't like it because of the JavaScript functions in the <HEAD> tag). I use PHP to keep things organized and the content fresh. It's also used to power the contact form and the newsletter subscription widget. Anyone who has designed websites even a little probably knows what a pain in the ass it is to get your site looking identical across all browsers, since every browser renders CSS differently. Only in recent years have browser developers started to adhere more closely to web standards. Internet Explorer is especially notorious for having awful support for web standards, mostly because Microsoft doesn't like to play nice with the other kids. I highly encourage PC users to switch to Firefox, and for Mac users, try Safari, Firefox, or my personal favorite, Camino. So, given the browser mishmash out there, I'm rather proud of the fact that I coded the entire site by hand on a Macintosh, and the very first time I went to test it on IE on a PC...it displayed perfectly!! It's pretty unusual for anything to work the first time around, let alone a website, so please pardon my boasting. The other thing I'm very happy about is the integration of Movable Type into the site design. The pages themselves are not being generated by MT templates or tags, but I am using MT as a content management system and a fancy text editor, to replace the need to FTP into my site to make changes. I won't go into the details, but if you're interested in learning more, Douglas Bowman, designer extraordinaire, has a very good explanation of how it works on his Stopdesign site. This is really just scratching the surface of Movable Type's amazing flexibility, and Matt Haughey (MetaFilter creator) has an article describing potential non-blog-related uses for MT. So...there you have it - a "brief" summary of my latest work as well as a little evangelizing on behalf of Movable Type. Note the irony that this post (and indeed this whole blog) was written using Blogger. It still holds a special place in my heart. If you've got some web design work you'd like me to do, get in touch. I might just do it for free...and on an empty stomach.