root - Firstly I never said I could learn a language in 10 days... I said I could learn a typical language in a bout a month...
Firstly, My apologies, in fact you did say that you'd be able to learn new languages in a month or two, not ten days, you said you'd been "in the game" for ten years...
Anyway...
in answer to your questions/statements...
Also thank you I am very glad you think my site looks like crap, so do I... But it looks like crap cause I personally don't want my site to simply follow any typical website out there...
You don't want to follow any website out there...
Firstly fucking huge kudos for that, I can't stand it when people rip off someone else, copy their code, change a could of colour tags, or even leave all the templates and colour exactly the same and try to pass it off as their own work. so it's good you've not done that.
http://youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com/blog3/
Go there to see what I mean.
Which is what has taken so long; trying new templates here and there, figuring out exactly what parts I want to keep, what parts I want to throw out ect ect.
Templates? what templates? it might be rude, but I can't honestly say that I can see anything that really counts as designed on that site, it's all added in the page, just kind of dumped there. there is no real design
http://www.csszengarden.com/
Go there to see what I mean about designed pages that can be used again.
Pardon me for not doing a professional job on a draft that I knew would just be thrown out to begin with...
What's the point in doing the draft if you're not going to make it something that you can improve upon? I mean are you saying that you just wanted to get some content up there? or you wanted to test some designs? I'm not sure, because you seem to lack both content and design on that site,
I'll have to admit that I haven't signed up to your site so I can't see the members area.
I mean seriously would you do everything 100% correct for a bunch of code that you knew you would just be throwing out later on, when you felt it was time to re-code the entire thing? Pretty sure you wouldn't when you are doing a site that is not just a simple couple of pages...
Ummmm, actually yes!
talk to any of the members here who I worked on a forum project with, all code I submitted was finished to the level and stage of the project that was expected, all the code was commented to a good standard so that other people in the project could work on and improve my code.
aside from that, every site I make starts with a blank template, I finish the look before adding the content, I forget what it's called, but there is a way of writing text that makes no sense but looks like it might make sense so you get an idea of content, yet not caught up in the fact that there is actually text that can distract you from the design.
Anyway, the point is that every site that I make starts in the same way
The first step is either with pen and paper, or with a copy of paint, in this I draw a rectangle, that's the page, I'll draw a space for the header, and a space for the page, everything is just line drawing, from here I work out where my containers need to be for the text, and alignment and pictures etc.
Second step is using notepad with two empty documents, one called style.css and one called template.html
I'll have firefox and IE open and build up a template, (usually starting from the top and working down).
looking at my drawn template a a visual representation of what I'm doing I'll go down opening div tags for each section, and then closing them all, the n I change to the style page and add tags to determin page placement, at the design stage I usually add a border to everything so that I can see where the elements are.
enough of my process, the point is yes, I try to make all of my designs perfect, pixel perfect, for the simple reason that they are my designs, and they are my templates.
look at it this way, in a few weeks you'll throw that site away, you can't keep or re-use any of it.
lets say that you spent three hours making it, that's three hours wasted.
now assume that you were more worried about your prototype design, you could have spent six hours properly designing it, and making it pixel perfect, you may think that this wastes three hours as you may still throw it away,
but it's not, because if you have a good looking pixel perfect site, you can sell that template, or you can re-use that template. so that extra three hours can save days of work later, or even just become a page in a portfolio that may help make you some money.
your site that you have now really is a waste of three hours, because given time you get rid of it and start again, and you'll never put that page in a portfolio.
Anyway...
firstly, ignore the fact that the OP has likely used a template, assume that they sat down with their client and designed that site, then they used a CMS to build that site, what's the problem. they earned their money in the design stage.
and they earned their money as a web designer.
are you seriously saying that if someone uses dream weaver then they aren't a real designer cause they aren't writing the code themselves, or their work is somehow less worthy than yours?
(personally I can't use dream weaver, -i find it confusing).
but that doesn't take away from people who can conceptualise and visualise a design and actually make it happen.
I personally find "designing" a site a lot harder than making a site.
