Andrew Kelsall | Graphic Designer | Logo, Poster and Leaflet Design

Image: LaRuth

The Very Begining…

I can remember when I first designed my first web site a few years ago. Having no knowledge of HTML or web design, I decided to take the plunge and learn for myself. As a Graphic Design graduate in print design (at Coventry University, UK), I had little experience in the online side of design. So, little surprise that it took me over a year (on-and-off) tinkering and learning from books and online tutorials.

Don’t get me wrong, this article isn’t a CSS tutorial of any sort, but it will outline the resources that really helped me to eventually hand-code my own compliant CSS. Firstly, I never ever really got to grips with basic HTML, as I designed my first web-site using Adobe GoLive—a now, discontinued application. I used to tinker around with the code with no real understanding of its meaning. No wonder I re-designed one site three times until I was happy.

The late discovery…

About 18 months ago, I was surfing the internet when I stumbled upon a wonderful site—CSS Mania. There were some designs on there that were truly amazing, and I couldn’t figure out why they looked so good. So, I looked into some of the featured web-sites’ code—and discovered that the sites were constructed from <div> tags. This new world of code enticed me to find out more. I knew that I possessed a certain degree of intelligence, so I decided there and then to learn CSS…oh yes.

I may have discovered CSS rather late—indeed many designers had been utilizing it for a few years, but I was determined to learn. So I searched online for tutorials to help me gain some new coding skills, but the information I was discovering wasn’t structured enough for me. There were varied topics by different authors, publishing tutorials for different skill-levels. This was no good, so I searched for books to buy instead.

The first book I read was Beginning CSS Web Development, by author, blogger and designer, Simon Collison. This great resource gave me the skills I needed to code my first website, with subsequent revisions. The second book I studied was CSS Mastery [Advanced Web Standards Solutions] by Simon Collison, Andy Budd and Cameron Moll. This took me from a beginer-level to a more competent CSS coder.

I recommend anyone who wants to learn CSS coding to take a look at these books (and other like them) to grasp the basic fundamentals of this skill-set. Just like many things in life, once you actually grasp the basic fundamentals of coding, you’re already half way there.

The Final Conclusion…

I never ended up being an expert in this field, nor did I intend to. What I wanted to do is be able to promote my services online with ‘my own hand’ as it were. I’m not at any kind of skill level to offer web design related services to clients, but I am able to design with much trail and error, may I add, my own sites.

In the next installment in this set of articles, I’ll start to outline how I customized my blog (yeah, like the post title states) and hopefully start to write some helpful hints that I’ve learned. If you missed article #2, you can read it here.

Image: LivePine

Recently, I installed the DoFollow plugin for WordPress—something I’ve been intending to do for a few weeks now. One of the first places I learned about this tool whilst reading the blog of London-based graphic designer Rob Cubbon.

Basically, for those of you who don’t know what this software is, the DoFollow Plugin is some code for WordPress that gives commentors credit for leaving comments in blog post, like this one.

The credit that is given is the absence of the ‘No Follow’ tag, which allows search engine spiders, such as GoogleBot, to follow the web URL to your site. In a nut-shell, if you leave a [unspammy] meaningful comment on any of my blog posts, your site (providing you entered your URL) will receive ‘Link Juice‘—adding more web-authority and respectability to your own site.

I have done this to reward commenters on this blog, as by default, WordPress blogs treat links in posts with a ‘No-Follow‘ tag. If you have any thoughts on any of my upcoming articles, including constructive criticism, feel free to leave a comment—and benefit your own site in the process.

So if your wondering what sheep and my blog have in common, well, they both follow!

September Update:

Recently, I have discovered a better plugin than NoFollow. The Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin does the same basic function of the other plugin, but is customizable. I can set the plugin to keep NoFollow on my own posts, but set it to follow other peoples’ comments after they have posted a pre-determined amount of comments. I have done this to help prevent comment-spammers from gaining link juice, but still rewards regular commenters. If you’re using WordPress, I highly reccommmend it. Additionally, the comment-count of a commenter is displayed. Great!

This is the second part in a series about how I customized my Wordpress Blog (read the first part). Before I proceed with the next part, learning CSS, I thought I’d tell of my recent experiences with actually hosting AndrewKelsall.com.

For years, I had used US-based hosting service Netfirms. I was reasonably happy with this company for about 4 years, until I noticed huge amounts of downtime on one of my other sites over the following months. I set up some online monitoring with Pingdom (which may I add is an excellent service) and discovered, to my horror, that my sites average uptime was a dismal 95.45%—totally outrageous! After countless emails to their awful customer service folks, nothing was done about it—and they wouldn’t even admit there was a problem with my site uptime percentage.

That was it, I was moving—but to which hosting service? I had never moved hosting providers before, and I’d heard that it can be a chore if you don’t know what you’re doing—like myself. I had a site, a blog and other domains named I owned which needed to be transfered, so I set about spending hours researching the net for advice, answers and resolutions to my needs.

I’m not going to go into great detail about this, but this is the jist of how I chose my new web host—MediaTemple—or (mt). After great deliberation and much research, I initially decided to use Fused Network, a fairly new company who appeared to have great reviews with 99.9% guaranteed uptime. However, these reviews were from a ‘web host review site’ that sounded too good to be true.

As I’m quite cautious, I decided to check the domain servers (via who.is) of the review site, HostJury—and guess what? They were hosted by no other than Fused Network! I can only assume that the sites were linked in some way, as there was also an identical iPod competition running on both sites. What a shame, this company looked promising with excellent customer service, so I found. Also, I found out they were a Canadian host, but I required a US-based one because of my prospective reader-base.

Media Temple, however, was a host that I was initially put-off with. It had mixed reviews—not because of bad customer service and lack of features, or even price. The issue with (mt) was one of reliability on their Grid Server. I’ll not go into too much detail, but the Grid Server is fairly new (and experimental) technology that has one main advantage—handling traffic spikes on blogs, etc. The main complaint I found over and over again on the web, is that the Grid was failing quite a bit and was unreliable.

On the plus side, I read a great deal about how these problems were being addressed and ironed-out by Media Temple’s team of highly skilled technicians. So, after being tired of researching the web-host issue—and the fact that I could just pay (mt) monthly (so I could move hosts again if things didn’t quite work out), I moved over to ‘The Grid’. Now, 3 months into the (mt) experience, I must say that their customer service is excellent, the features are great—and my uptime is over 99.9%. Brilliant (thanks Pingdom).

I intend to stay with Media Temple for two main reasons. Firstly, they inform me of issues with their servers, which are actually becoming less frequent, with the servers more stable than ever. Secondly, their customer service is second-to-none. When I was moving my sites to them, they gave me advice on what to do with transferring my other blogs’ database, as well as transferring all my domain names and their registry information/servers. I hadn’t done this before, but they supported me in my hour of need. Thank-you James Starbuck, Amanda, Alex, Paul, Brandon and the whole (mt) team. Yes, that’s a lot of support (make that hours of need)!

Funnily enough, apart from the fact that my sites had a terrible downtime record with Netfirms, I left them for poor customer service. So, after my move to (mt), I closed my account with Netfirms—and to my surprise, their customer support was top-notch! Maybe the folks in the support department should swop places with Accounts. Just a thought.

Have you had a bad experience with a web host? Can you recommend another host that uses new technologies, such as grid servers? I’d like to hear your thoughts…