After two frustrating-yet-exciting days spent with Dreamweaver and Photoshop, I am finally making progress. It turns out that my new web page layout is fairly complex, involving three columns (two overlapping, which gets complicated) and quite a bit of image reprocessing. But I have figured out how to do it, and have happily been working away in Photoshop to create the necessary images. (It turns out that there is actually quite a bit of work to be done with the images, too – more than I expected, and I’ve had to redo some of the images three or four times over as I figure out how to create the files, what file formats to use, etc. I never really appreciated the difference between .jpg, .gif, and .png before!)
All that aside, I think I should still be able to finish the homepage by end of this week. So that’s what I’ll be working on. After that it should go much quicker, though I’ll have a lot of work to do to come back and clean up the homepage template file. My objective is to do it as cleanly as possible, and that involves moving a lot of the formatting into a separate CSS stylesheet. This isn’t just about getting the homepage looking right – it’s also about mastering the techniques.
Once I get all the templates ready and do a couple of test pages to make sure it works, I will probably hire someone on oDesk to do the actual migration of files into the site. I anticipate that the whole project will probably take four or five weeks for me to complete, and another four or five weeks for someone else to do the migration into the new template (I have a LOT of pages -and images – to migrate).
What fun! I’m learning a lot and enjoying myself a lot. Sure, it’s frustrating when things don’t work, but it feels SO good when you finally figure it out!