Chapter 12, What You See is What You Get

I've created a website for myself with Google's Page Creator. I needed to get my portfolio (or at least part of it) online and figured that Google's WYSIWYG editor would do just fine until I can make something of my own.

8 Bit Artist is a friend's portfolio/website that I coded--the design is his. I enjoy making websites, but they are very time consuming. What's worse is that most of the work is hidden from your visitors and difficult to explain to someone who does not do the work themselves.

When I am designing a site my friends and family frequently become annoyed with me, or bored, or both, as I excitedly explain the new CSS trick that I learned and used, or how I defeated the annoying rendering scheme used by Internet Explorer in order to make my site display correctly.

There's something about building a website that is a lot like building a model, only with out the citrus-y stench of model glue): I work with Notepad, for the most part, and code everything by hand, so it's exciting when I render a page and see the pieces of my design come together to make something that's functional, that you can move around, but that looks like a work of art (at least, that's what I aspire to).

I don't know how that's like building a model, but that analogy made sense to me when I first typed it.