Finally my new design is done, well at least useable done. There are a few things I still need to do to it. Overall I like this design, it is not as unique as my last one but this one can grow. I also learned a bit of PHP in making this design.

I will be making some changes on the design but you most likely will not notice, mainly just cleaning up code. The part that you will end up noticing will be the Pictures page, at the moment it is not there. I figured I could put my design up without it for now. But rest assured I am working on it. There are a lot of pictures that I have to go through again, so it will take me some time.

For this design I was going for something simple. My last design, even though I loved it and miss it, was hard to add content to. The circular theme made that difficult, either it would not fit in or it looked funky. So this time around I wanted something that could grow and change without much difficulty. I also added some random pictures I took to the header, so they will change when you refresh the page. The random PHP script I used came from Photo Matt’s Random Image Script.

Trying to get my design to look the same in Firfox and IE was interesting to say the least. But in the end they are pretty close, the only real difference is some spacing issues but that is ok. I do think that the site looks best in Firefox. Since Firefox is my browser of choice I made sure it looked better in it the it did in IE There are two things with this design that work in Firfox and not in IE. The first one is .png drop shadows. IE does not support partially transparent .png’s. Although IE7 does support it. So what this means is I can make a drop shadow, apply it to a picture and wherever I move it on the webpage you will be able to see whatever is behind it. If you design web pages you will understand why this is exciting, otherwise just trust me that it is awesome. A good article on this can be found at http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/dropshadows.html. The second thing is when you select a form field the color will change. Just an added bonus but not needed.

While making this design I learned a bit more PHP. This is exciting because for some reason PHP seemed to have a big learning curve for me. While making this design I had to write some of my own functions, which helped me realize that I am finally starting to get over the top of the curve. This makes me so happy. Even though the functions I wrote are simple I still did them on my own with out looking at a book or a website! The first one is a simple percent function. It takes the percent I want to show on my progress bars and then figures out how many pixels the bar needs to be in one direction to represent that percentage. So this one was just a simple math function. The second function was so that it could tell what page it was on and then have it output the page name to the div id so that I could make the background color be different for each page. (I.e. Project – pink, Pictures – green, Contact – purple, and so forth.)