Today I had quite a lot of energy, and finished the redesign of my own software development company's website Castle Amber. I started on the initial design last Friday. I used the vector drawing program Xara to layout the design, pick the colors, etc. Then on Saturday I started to copy the design to a test web page using HTML and a cascading style sheet (CSS).
Last week was quite a hard week for me since I had a major depressive episode. Somehow on Friday, I was able to play a bit with Xara, and finally was able to do something useful and satisfying.
Today's work consisted mostly of the final CSS tweaks, and editing the text file that contains the contents of the web site. About a year ago I decided to store all site contents in a single text file and have a small Perl script create all pages. Since the original design used a single column and the new version uses two, I had to add a marker to each page section in the file so the program knows when to switch from the left to the right column.
For years I have been a liquid design advocate, however I decided to use a "fixed" design for Castle Amber. Every time when I ended up on my own sites, I had to resize the browser window width in order to get a decent line length. Moreover, I consider the default font size way too big. Yes, I am aware that many people have problems with small writing. But I hope that they don't use Internet Explorer as their default browser unless they overrule the font size suggestions.
Anyway, have a look: Perl programming and consultancy. If the browser you use has problems with rendering the pages correctly, please contact me.