This Ain't No Walk in the Park

Trial and error, rinse, repeat…
Things are getting down to the wire for launching my first CSS-based design onto the web. After aeons of coding, tweaking and tweaking, and testing in Safari and Firefox, then checking IE and balling up my fists and sobbing, then tweaking again, things are coming together in a good way. It’s not going to end up on Webcreme, but hey, it’s an insurance site. I figure that people go to insurance company websites for basically two reasons; either they want to get a quote on insuring some aspect of their lives, or they need to file a claim because of some sort of calamity. They probably won’t be in the mood to marvel at pretty colors and fancy animations. So I focused on making the information as clear as possible, and putting in lots of useful links.
Here’s what I learned:
1) Just because the client says something looks fine, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to need changing eventually. A.K.D.F. Always Keep Design Flexible.
2) Bigger doesn’t always mean better. Case in point, the client wanted a form like the one on the “big” company’s site(AUTHOR'S NOTE: I was going to do the "big" site a favor and link back to them, but luckily I tested the link and it "traps" the browser so one can't go back, which further proves my point!). I dutifully went to the url they sent me to check it out and it was a sticky mess of tables, inaccessibility and non-usability. I kept trying to explain that simple was better. After all, the “big” site’s form only had room for 2 or 3 questions per page and there was no way to go forward and check to see how much the user was getting into! Plus, it was pretty difficult to locate it on the company’s site.
3) Sometimes it’s the little things that make a big difference. I spent 15 minutes tearing my hair out over changing a div’s border to a nicer color only to realize that DreamWeaver’s “code-hint” tool had neglected to include the semicolon on the end of the attribute. One keystroke, and everything worked again.
4) When in doubt, go to a site that you know has the format you are going for and hit View>Source.
5) When nothing seems to be working right, go take a walk.

This Ain't No Walk in the Park