Designing a website is hard. Really hard. Especially if the coding aspect doesn't come naturally to you (like me--long gone are the days where I thought I wanted to code as a career). Not only do you have to worry about the content of what you're creating, which is usually the only aspect you're graded on, but now you have to go through the intense stress of figuring out where you forgot to place an end bracket, or making sure your text isn't upsidown - come on, I'm sure someone's done it.

All of that said, when you do finally figure out how on earth to apply a background image behind a grid (update: now I have), and you start to make design choices that make you go "yeah, that does look a lot better!", you can at least smile when you realize that there are a million other websites that do their jobs better.

Here's just a quick example of what I'm talking about: See that bar on the right side with the different parts in it? When designing this website, I could have made it so that on each individual page, the the section that you have open no longer displays on the sidebar. It's a clever touch, however I opted to keep them there at all times so that the user has the option to open a new tab of the page, for example, rather than not having that option. I also thought that as purely an asthetic choice, the consistency looked more appealing.

Part One: Introduction

Part Two: Into the Methods

Part Three: Designing your Website