blog | CreateSean Web Design

Styling Code

Tuesday June 24 2008

As I mentioned in the previous entry I wanted to be able to style code on this blog. Coincidentally last night there was a thread on the EE forums asking the same question. In the end I discovered that when wrapping text in [ code][ /code] tags EE adds another div with a class codeblock which I was then able to style. It’s temporarily set to look like this:

.codeblock {width: 200; overflow: auto; background: #e7e7e7; border: 1px solid #666;} 

Looking at this, setting the width doesn’t seem to be having any effect.

Hmm.. blog title is getting cropped in IE - will have to fix that soon.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Tuesday Jun 24, 2008 at 05:18 AM
code | CSS |

| tags: ee thread, expressionengine, css, this blog, |

Tomorrow is the beginning

Monday June 23 2008

Tomorrow I start work on my first clients site. Today I was busy with paperwork for the end of the semester, but now I’m on vacation until September first and I can fully concentrate on web design.

Last night I wasn’t sure if my client was going to accept my quote. While thinking (worrying) I decided that I would create this blog to record my journey. When I got home this afternoon I had two free hours to get it done and then I had to pick up my kids - I managed to get a little work on the blog done between cooking and feeding them. In any case I think for about 3.5 hours of work, I did a pretty good job of getting a minimalist template up with no images other than buttons in the footer and an RSS icon.

There’s still a little work to be done - there’s some unsightly white space at the top of the page in FF (don’t know why), need to add the contact page and tidy up my code. Much of the code is cut and paste from other blogs and as such I’m pretty sure there’s some extraneous markup. All that of course will have to wait until I get my first client’s site taken care of.

Also on the to do list, mostly related to freelancing - get a business license, Merchant account with Visa, make business cards, set up a boilerplate contract. I have set up time tracking with Slim Timer to help me get better at estimating my time per project. - I’m sure I’ll find that I have under estimated the time required for this client. But with experience and time tracking I’ll get better at it.

I’m looking forward to the adventure

Big Priority

The big priority for this blog is to be able to post code without it being rendered or breaking the layout. I really want to have it display with horizontal scroll bars like the Expression Engine forums do when using code tags.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Monday Jun 23, 2008 at 09:43 PM
General |

| tags: free lancing, this blog, time tracking, |

First Entry

This blog is going to record my journey into professional web design. Early this year (2008) I decided to prepare a career transition into web design. The first thing I did in this venture was to redesign my teaching blog. At this time there are a couple of small things that need work there, but surprisingly I’ve picked up my first client purely on the basis of that design.

I’m actually a little unprepared for a first client, but when one comes knocking it’s not a good idea to turn them away. My original plan was to redesign my family site (no link here), let’s learn korean, and the portfolio site for my new venture. I figured that by the end of that I would have solidified by knowledge of CSS and Xhtml and be ready to start looking for clients.

At that point I was going to start paying attention to the business side of things, like getting a business license, a Visa merchant account, business cards, contracts, payment schedules, hourly rates etcetera. However, I’ve had to start all that this past weekend.

I’ll be blogging about all aspects of my move into pro design - coding, client relations, taxes, business regulations and more.

The design for this blog is a really quick, clean and minimalist design. I don’t have time to do something fancy so I’m keeping it as simple as possible. I actually wanted to make a grayscale theme for EE core and release it to the community and I may end up using this as the basis for that.

A couple of things I want to do is figure out how to post code so that it has a horizontal scroll in order to not break the layout. I also need to add category lists to the sidebar and I’m going to invest in the tag module and set up tagging here.

Notice

I’ve been blogging regularly for four years and I learn well by writing about it. What I’m saying is that this blog is not going to end up with only a few entries and disappear. I’m good at blogging and this will help me transition into my chosen career so potential readers can expect to see entries for a long time to come.