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CSS Drives Me Nuts!

21 November 2009 3 Comments
CSS Drives Me Nuts!

There.  I said it.

Since I switched to this new theme — and very soon there will be an entire post about that experience — there have been a few little issues I’ve had with various sections not displaying quite the way I wanted them to.

One of the first issues I wanted to tackle was the font size.  The default was Arial/Helvetica 12 point, which looks very, very small for some reason.  So I upped it to 14 point, which I’m pretty sure is what the old design had.  (If it featured 12 point, then it just looked bigger than that.)

For several days, I’ve been battling that “top story” position as it appears on single post/search result/archive pages.  The excerpt text in that box was gargantuan by comparison to the rest of the page.  I knew it was about 18 point type when it should have been 14.  I posted something in the forum at Colorlabs, where I got this theme, and I even sent a “support ticket” to ask for help in finding it.

And while waiting for answers, and still stubbornly tinkering with the stylesheet myself, I finally found the one little command that was making the type too big.

Once in a while, I have these delusions that I’d like to one day make money by doing web design.  It’s delightful little moments like these with CSS sheets where nothing is clear because nobody can bother to take the time to label anything clearly that I’m shaken to my senses.

At least temporarily.

Everything doesn’t have to be this difficult.

3 Comments »

  • Mika said:

    People who code in C/variants, Delphi, Perl etc very soon learn that the unwritten rule of coding is “comment everything.” Scrolling through thousands or even millions of lines of code is invigorating enough without having no in-line commentary to help you find what you’re looking for.

    It is therefore interesting to me that stylesheets, which by their very purpose are supposed to be flexible and frequently edited, quite often have no commentary at all. Considering how large stylesheets can get for scripts like WordPress, combing through them for that one specific variable isn’t my idea of a day in the park, either.

    # 21 November 2009 at 9:55 am
  • Diana said:

    What Mika said is so very true, comment everything!
    I used to design web sites and I found that there is very little money in it and the customer wants everything for free. One customer I had to explain to her what a web browser, what font types were and I just gave up designing web sites

    CSS drove me me nuts.

    # 21 November 2009 at 11:39 am
  • Mika said:

    Yeah, I hear ya. I do web design intermittently, but only for people or companies that I already know, or know someone who works for them. I don’t charge much, but in turn, I also do not avail myself to wait on hand and foot on their every whim. I ask them questions to determine what they need, build a site based on those needs and some room for expandability, and I do not do content production – they provide the text and the images and all that junk. In most cases I don’t involve them in the process much at all, I may ask them what colors they prefer etc, but in the end I trust my own instinct in terms of design and usability a lot more than I do them. Sometimes people ask for things like custom mouse cursors or other junk that has questionable cross-browser support and makes the page load slower, and I just tell them outright that I recommend against it.

    I could never do that kind of work as a 9-to-5 thing. On a project by project basis on a discount for people I know, sure. But for clueless companies with massive senses of entitlement, nah. Most design suggestions coming from people with zero web design experience under their belt are, plainly put, bad ideas.

    # 22 November 2009 at 10:14 am

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