Weaving Nightmares

I am sick and tired of working on websites. I knew the work I was doing with Dreamweaver 8 wasn't going to amount to much. I knew that it wasn't going to be compatible with Blogger. I knew all that, but there was a small part of me that believed it would. I hoped that all the hours I invested in this blasted program was going to produce something great.

It's very likely that I don't have a clue what I'm doing with the program. I'm not taking advantage of any of the intermediate or advanced features, mostly because I don't know how. What I am doing, creating style sheets, linking them to my HTML document and formatting my CSS in the HTML page takes some knowledge. However, Dreamweaver is not doing all the heavy lifting, I still am. I'm still hand coding the vast majority of what I'm doing and that doesn't seem right.

This is the problem with WYSIWYG's, what I see in Dreamweaver, is not what I'm seeing in the browser. My XHTML validates, my CSS validates, and I have cross-platform compatibility, yet there is one tag that affects the page in Dreamweaver, but doesn't affect it when I preview the page in a browser.

Later this afternoon, when I realized my design wasn't going to work in Blogger, I looked into WordPress. Many of the better-designed blogs out there use it and so I thought, if it works with them, I can see it, in the end, working for mine. The first thing I needed to do was create the template for my blog. I began reading about how to do that. I continued reading, and read some more, then more. While I loosely understand the concept, there is little out there to solidify my knowledge. Then I got lost when I realized I needed to use PHP.

I tried to learn PHP last year by buying one of those horrible 900-page Behemoth XLs (read: books) that ultimately teach you how to create the Internet. It was an attempt to make my website dynamic and I got lost at page 27. I'm sure I understood the underlying concepts and even the syntax but it was putting it all together that twists my brain into a knot.

What doesn't help is that I never start small. I always figure that if I'm going to do it, I want to go for the gold. So, I have the very complicated design that I need to shoehorn into WordPress using templates and PHP and CSS and XHTML and all other acronyms that I only have a rudimentary understanding.

For the next couple of weeks, I'm going to try and study and work on getting a firm grasp on everything I need to learn. If your thinking about me taking a college course in this, stop. They don't offer one. They offer one about Dreamweaver, and I may in the future begin taking that, but that's not what I want. I want to know how to do it the hard way before I start doing something the "easy" way.