WSR - Website update

I've been working on my Website, and although it's not a real professionally designed, and for that matter a professional looking one, it's mine, and I enjoy doing all the work on and with it. And in my travels on the Internet and looking at other photographers' Website and pages I look for new ideas in design and presentation. And recently I've been playing with background colors.

The problem is that I don't have much of a sense of color in design and I prefer more warm and earth colors. So trying new colors for the background I end up with one of three reactions. The first is the obvious, "Oh my God, that is really ugly.", in an instant, no thought or emotion, just it sucks. The second is the next obvious. "Well, it's different, and maybe better.", so I'll use it for a few days to see if it gets better or worse.

The last is the target, "That's cool.", which means I'll keep it until I find a better one. The real problem is that I'm blue-green color blind, which is why the background is a shade of brown, hopefully what I see is what you see, or as best which can be read by your computer and browser. And this gets into the second topic, browsers.

I won't argue browsers, it's a touchy issue with real Website designers. As I say in the browser optimization Web page, I design with Safari, Apple's standard browser, and I check the pages with Netscape, Firefox and Opera. I recently added OmniWeb, but I'm not so enamored with this one. I don't have Microsoft's IE browser so I can't and won't test it.

Why since most users use it? Because you can't. There are so many flavors, all with their own quirks, you simply can't account for all of them. And Microsoft is notorious for not being W3C complaint with their browsers and with the Web development and design software packages. And so I simply won't apologize for your lack of a good browser. And from what I can see and have been told, Safari is the least robust and most W3C complaint browser, meaning if it works in Safari, it should work anywhere.

Anyway, the changes. If your computer is color correct, the background should be a light milk chocolate, or "cbbe9c" in the hexidecimal color code. I'm still working on a new overall design or a better image presentation design, but I haven't learned enough flash or other packages yet. That will be the next generation of the Website.

One thing I have noted with checked the design is that each of the five browsers are just enough different you can't really expect the identical presentation. Some have preferences you can select which browser you want it to mimic, which is nice, but all are just a tad different. If you are interested, I design for a 900x1024 browser size, which you can check with a blank image which is exactly 900x1024.

This is the size of the space I start with and work from there. All my Web pages are developed for 600x800 presentation inside that Web page with vertical scrolling. This size was the suggestion of a friend who's a former journalist and Web designer. It has to do with the normal movement of the eyes when viewing printed pages. And it's why I hate Websites that use pages which are considerably wider, especially full screen. That's dumb.

Anyway, that's the update.