On the Design of this Blog

You've probably noticed (because you're sharp like that) that this blog uses one of the standard Blogger templates. Having noticed this you might be thinking "But Mike, you bang on about how you care about good, interesting design. How can you use a tedious, common Blogger layout? You big hypocrite". Well, fair point. I'd love to be able to use a beautiful layout that I'd designed from scratch and that encapsulated my entire personality in a few well-chosen lines, boxes and fonts. That's not going to happen. Mainly because I know nothing about the actual process of web-design. I could draw a pleasing simulation of a page in Adobe Illustrator or InDesign but actually getting that into someone's browser is currently beyond me.

That's not to say I don't want to learn. I'd love to get to grips with HTML, CSS and other fancy web-design techniques. In fact, I'm sure that the cool kids aren't using HTML or CSS to do anything any more and I've probably just demonstrated how little I know. Oh well.

The problem is that learning web-design would take time. I know that I'm sufficiently obsessive that if I started to learn I'd have to get to a stage where I knew a lot about the techniques. I would then spend a loooong time tweaking my web page to get it just as I wanted and making sure that the site was compatible with all available browsers and looked equally beautiful in all of them. This would not be time that I spent producing content for this blog or actually learning Cocoa. Between work, seeing my fiancee, interacting with the outside world and watching House my time for the blog and coding is somewhat limited. It's probably best that I don't squeeze that time any more by developing an obsession with web design.