Why I really ought to learn CSS.

I’ve been tweaking this site night and day, trying to get all the kinks knocked out of it. It appears that although the Theme designer came up with an attractive design for this WordPress theme, it was full of errors in the CSS. And because I really don’t know CSS, it was quite a struggle for me to fix the problems.

Among the problems:

• References to styles that didn’t exist in the style.css file.
• Omission of code to prevent the sidebar from dangling below the rest of the page without a proper background.
• Incorrect references to styles (id vs. class; don’t ask me more than that).
• Styles set to display: none; so anything the style was applied to did not appear at all.
• Other stuff I can’t even remember (and don’t want to).

In fixing these problems, I introduced a few new ones. That’ll happen when you know just enough to make you dangerous.

I learned a lot. I learned that no matter how good and professional a theme design might look, it may have problems lurking under the surface. And I learned how to troubleshoot and fix the problems — or at least how to intelligently describe the problem to someone who knows what she’s doing so she can tell me how to fix it.

The she in this case is Miraz Jordan, who has been using WordPress for considerably longer than I have. Her site, MacTips.info, runs on WordPress. And she knows what she’s doing because she uses CSS all the time. She maintains “standards-based” Web sites while I mangle them.

So as I finally work the kinks out of the site and prepare it for general release, I need to publicly thank Miraz for her help. Without her, I never would have gotten the site to look half as good as it does.

And I have a new New Year’s Resolution (other than the usual “lose weight”): learn CSS.

Now if only I can figure out those PHP commands I need to add the RSS feed code…