CSS anyone?

About three months ago I shifted my focus from pure design to more of design implementation. I find it more challenging from a technical perspective to look at a flat mock-up and try to see how it will be implemented as valid CSS/XHTML.

I don't know, I kind of enjoy it more than designing itself. Technical over Creative for me, I guess. I view a mock-up and place imaginary boundaries between page elements, separating the header, any sidebars, main content area, footers, and any other logical sections. Then I replace those elements with text in my head, and place XHTML tags around those pieces of text according to their semantic function.

At this point I begin to write the code snippets in my head into a web page. Adding each section in until I have all parts complete. Then the styling begins. I go back to the design and try to analyze which combination of styles would be the best set for the site, and apply them. This goes on until the site comes out looking like the original design, in a way.

The next part is tweaking the sections until they are pixel-perfect in comparison to the mock-up, while maintaining validity of the code and CSS. This also includes making considerations so that incompatible browsers are supplied with propers styles to display the page as the designer intended. I guess this is where the bulk of CSS/XHTML work lies, which is a sad fact, all because some browsers choose to implement their own "standards." I mean, why bother calling them standards if there are so many?

When all the coding is done, I upload to a test server and ask for client approval, and hopefully, payment.


One last step. And perhaps the most important one: after payment has been made, always go to your favorite coffee shop and spend some of your earnings on a cup or two of your favorite brew.