I am part way through redesigning snailsnail.com. It has long been in need of it and finally yesterday (or was it the day before?) I got inspired and started hacking out a design.

And this is where we are as of right now – this is what a design of mine looks like when it’s half way done – basically most of the positioning is done – the header and the navigational links are done, you can’t see it but the footer is done, and now I have to put the stuff into all the boxes.

I have no idea how professional web-designers do this kind of stuff, in fact – it would be kind of nice to find out. Personally, I follow this process:

1. rough a design out on paper.
2. use a vector design program (my beloved inkscape) to create an image of the design.
3. on paper again – rough out the html structure of the page – into <div>s and so on
4. in dreamweaver (or alternative text editor (I basically only use dreamweaver as a text editor — it has very nice auto-complete) I write a barebones  html file that has all my divs nested correctly and with id’s or classes assigned plus place-holder text in them.
5. in dreamweaver also I write a css file which has empty definitions of all classes and id’s and link it to the html file.
6. In the css file I colour-code all the divs using html’s basic colours (which you can define simply by typing the word – red, cyan, black, etc).
7. I then work on layout – positioning all the elements correctly on the page.
8. I start a somewhat mixed-up process of exporting background images from inkscape which are linked to in the css, filling in proper content for the html file (replacing place-holder text with real text including <h1> tags, etc and images) and plugging in other style refinements (fonts, etc.)
9. Troubleshooting! The design is more or less done at this point and here is where I start fine-tuning things – juggling padding and margins and so on – re-exporting images where I’ve messed up and things don’t line up properly, and so on.
10. Test in IE and panic! …. then give up….   I always intend to start out from the beginning with testing my design in different browsers – but inevitably don’t bother and do it all in firefox. Finally I have to check it out in another browser and discover that everything is broken (thank you microsoft). I run through a period frantically googling for solutions to my problems before eventually just kind of giving up and pretending that everyone in the world uses firefox.

Anyway, we’re in 8. at the moment – although I haven’t done the finer parts of 7. yet.

I haven’t actually got much done today, because Davide and I popped out for an explore of the barrio [neighbourhood] – we found a bookshop which looked cool but was a bit overpriced, a place selling homemade wine for 1€ a litre (not half bad either) and finally we popped into a bar for cañas [small glasses of beer] and tapas. Then we decided to cook ourselves a feast – we made a crab-meat and parsley starter, followed by breaded mussels with tomato and finally stuffed squid. Unfortunately we overcooked the mussels because we were too involved in a game of backgammon, but everything else came out deliciously. Anyway – back to the html grindstone.

PS. – I am still not doing very well at keeping this blog up, as you may have noticed. I don’t see this situation improving anytime soon, to be entirely frank. However, you may like to check out the fotolog every so often, as I’m much better at keeping it up to date.