Esotropiart

A large part of my responsibilities at C2F include maintaining and designing their various web sites. A few of them are sites for the special lines of art supplies associated with or owned by the company. Connoisseur is one of these sites - good quality brushes, by the way. It was my first professional web design project. After some years of experience and learning, I have added quite a bit of trickery to my portfolio, especially when it comes to CSS implementation and interface design. The Connoisseur site was originally designed using mostly tables to set things in place. Though this is still acceptable (it was never "correct", since tables were originally created for a different purpose), using Cascading Style Sheets is now the mainstream, modern way to construct the visual presentation of a web site. In addition, CSS is far superior in most ways and produces code that is easier to read and maintain. The only down side to CSS is the turtlespeed/2,000,000 that most web browser companies take to implement the most recent recommendations. Microsoft is largely responsible for the web's current stone age and nonconformity, as they took a four year vacation from developing the number one browser, namely Internet Explorer.

It came to my attention (by myself informing myself) that I needed to update the pricing on the Connoisseur site, so I began doing that. In the process, I made a few changes to the html source that spawned an entire redesign. It is still driven by Dreamweaver templates instead of my preferred method of server side includes. I decided to keep it that way just to brush up on my Dreamweaver skills. Even so, the source code and the CSS are written almost from scratch. Sure, there are still tables to be found, but only when their use is sensible. There are certain situations where tabular data will always and should always appear on the web. Tables are not taboo: they should be used to present information that appears in a grid format. There is no way around it, unless you create more CSS/XHTML elements. And those elements would pretty much be the <table>, <tr>, and <td> with different names anyway.

I added a short EsoShow to highlight some of the graphical changes to the Connoisseur site.