Carrie Bickner’s book Web Design on a Shoestring was great. If there is anything most of us in Clio II will be doing, when and if we do a digital history project, is designing on a budget. And that budget may be significant but it is more likely, especially if it is a solo project, that it will be fairly skimpy. So, what are we to do? Well, Bickner has several suggestions. And, as displayed by my refusal to buy Dreamweaver (both because I am poor AND more importantly because I do not see myself doing any digital project until I am out of grad school, and you know by then it will be on Dreamweaver 12!!) and work with the not-so-user-friendly nVu/Kompozer, I am all about the low budget. Luckily, I have finally gotten the hang of all the little quirks as you can tell by my decent but VERY SIMPLE portfolio and css page. The one thing I would have liked is for Bickner to have created a 5th character – maybe a lowly grad student who has a budget of $0 or close to it. That would have been awesome!

The only other topic I will touch briefly is the issue of designing one’s webpage for multiple browsers. I would comment on the The Polyglot Manifesto but it seems many people have already done so and I figure I will comment on their sites as opposed to writing any further on it here. As for designing with IE, Mozilla and other browsers both old and new in mind, I was shocked to see what my site looked like on IE! The heading was the main problem and no matter what I tried I couldn’t seem to fix it easily. And it seems one of my problems (I am sure there are many) is my use of pixels, for the most part, instead of percentages or ems. The reading on css-discuss addresses this and honestly, I had not even thought to try my page on IE until then. I guess that tells you how much of a digital guy I am and also how much I have grown to love Mozilla and thus, detest IE. Back to my problem: I like pixels, I know what a pixel is. I really don’t have any idea what an em is and, while I know what a percentage is, what is this a percentage of?? But it seems like a significant issue, especially since I think a majority (right?) of web users till use IE as their browser. Hmmm, not good…

And here are my comments on other folks’ blogs for the week: