Windows, websites, and going home overnight

I don’t know why for the past couple of posts I’ve started making my titles groups of three things… strange! Ah well. I went home overnight last night, it was good to see my parents again and be back home. It did make me glad that I’m now a Linux user though – my mum’s computer seems to have got some kind of spyware on it. I’ve run Ad-Aware, and I’ve run Spybot, but still occasionally it pops up with an advertising window and the net sometimes runs incredibly slow. I’m glad I’m immune to all that stuff!

Anyway. I’ve started coming up with a design for this site. I’m not entirely sure which way to go with it, i.e. whether I’ll make WordPress the whole site, or whether it would be better to have this as the blog and all the other stuff as static pages. I’m kind of inclined at the moment to let WordPress handle most of the work, but I’m not sure. Ah well, the design should be basically the same!

Speaking of websites – on my last blog post, Matthew commented:

And what’s wrong with tables, might I ask? I’ve been using them a lot recently, though I have been getting rather annoyed with trying to get everything in the right place. I’m redesigning my own blog at the mo, and so far I’ve been using tables to achieve this. If there is a better way, do let me know…

I replied to him there, but I just wanted to say on the main page: CSS is the way forward. My experiences over the past few weeks and months have highlighted to me that the old way of designing websites is really on the way out. CSS is so much cleaner, it’s so much more powerful – once you’ve started using it, you won’t go back! (Not unless you really have to anyway – sometimes it’s unavoidable). To see what I mean, check out CSS Zen Garden: it’s a site written in XHTML and you can browse different stylesheets applied to the same code. Quite eye-opening! You try doing that with a table layout…