I just finished up Chrysarose's web site:

http://allthatglittersfacepaint.com/

While pretty simple, it was still challenging and time consuming. I'd had a fair bit of practice making web pages with iPhoto from working on wedding pictures (which I'm still procrastinating posting ;), so that part went fast, but you know, that last ten percent... ;) A few interesting/difficult issues:

• changing the background of the logo from white to black (not as straightforward as a click and replace, because of inbetween shades, although by converting to gif format I was able to get a nice organic effect using transparency)
• tables (need I say more? ;)
• converting glitter color (I started with a found image, and converted it frame by frame to match her color scheme)
• disappearing links (for the picture links, Chrysa wanted them to start with a black background and turn white when viewed. I realized that this would make the text links invisible if they had not been clicked on, and had to figure out how to override this. Thankfully there are tons of easily googlable awesome html tutorials, which I make much use of :)
• iPhoto not liking gifs (it lets you set a background image, but converted the animated gifs to still jpgs. So I replaced the jpgs on the main pages by hand, but was not about to go through and replace the for the hundreds of close-ups)
• iPhoto web page generation being buggy as all hell (sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't. When it didn't work and I tried to regenerate a gallery, it would do things like distort images, match a thumbnail to the wrong image, and other things of that nature. There were no fixes within the program for these problems, and even if I restarted the program it didn't help. The only thing that helped was rebooting my computer, which I did repeatedly throughout the process. I figured out a lot of indirect clugy ways of getting iPhoto to do what I wanted, and even with all the bugs, it was still more versatile and a huge time saver over other photo album creation I've done)
• link color (iPhoto does not assign link color, and default link colors don't look so hot on a black background. Again, easy enough to change by hand, for the main pages, but not something I'm going to go in and fix with every single page)
• scripting (in order to make the background animated and make the links more visible the individual picture links, I asked Patri to show me how to do so with a shell script so that I wouldn't have to modify a couple hundred web pages by hand. I have a little experience with shell scripting, but its been years, and my experience is minimal. He took care of the glitter in one gallery for me, and I took care of the rest based on his example. The first time I did not modify the output file correctly and saved over some theatre pictures with henna ones. I was very unhappy. ;) But I had a back-up file, Patri fixed the mess I made for me, and I didn't make any more mistakes after that ;)
• regeneration issues (it will be hard to go in and modify pages, because of all of the hand coding and scripting I've done. Chrysa is happy with the pages and that should be fine, but it would be nice to be able to regenerate galleries without losing all of our preferences. Hence, suggestions about organization, resizing and the like will be politely ignored. ;) Several people have mentioned the notion of style sheets to me, I will have to look into that next time I design a web page. I'm not sure whether or not something like that will work with using iPhoto, but if it did it would sure make life a lot easier!)

I really like web page design and have considered getting into it, and may yet at some point in the future, although I'm not sure that it would be a good idea for me ;) I tend to get very intense, obsessive, and anal about this sort of thing, and am not sure whether or not I'd "get over" that. While I do focus very intensely on teaching piano lessons, I don't seem to have a problem with "taking my work home with me" in that context, but I sometimes get very upset with artwork, especially web design... which is probably not good for me, and which Patri really doesn't like ;) (He tried to get me to stop working on our wedding invite page several times because I was getting myself so worked up about various little nitpicks, although I am happy with my pearl in the end ;)

To be hopeful, I recall that I used to sometimes get this way about ceramics back in high school, and I haven't really had such problems in that field for a while. Perhaps taking some good web design classes would help, and getting a stronger grip on scripting, style sheets, and whatnot.

But anyway, not really a concern right now ;) I'm just happy to have created something cool and useful, and it will be nice as a portfolio piece down the road should I decide to pursue a web design career. It was nice working with Chrysa on it, because she's very undemanding and patient, and I didn't have the "I'm paying you, you'd better do it right!" sort of pressure ;) Plus I like her work and think its really cool that she paints people at our parties, and I'm glad to see her art displayed on the web on more than just my livejournal icons and wedding invite page ;)

It was also nice hanging out with Xatherine while finishing up today, I really love having people around while working on this sort of projects, especially when they're understanding about my slowness with attention shifting ;)