People are birthed and birds are hatched,
But for a website, it’s not quite as simple as that.
First, there’s the planning—an important endeavor.
Or, to untrained eyes: “doing nothing, whatsoever.”
The designer, 60% of her time thusly spent,
Can then proceed to step two: the content.
Images are made and witticisms crafted,
Six hours spent, and nary a design is drafted.
To the text editor, the designer, she hurriedly clicks,
Only slightly delayed by a slight fear of ticks.
It took years of honing and diligent practice
To ready her mind for a challenge like this:
To render what is seen in her mind’s eye,
Command-V –
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Title of the document</title> </head> <body> The content of the document...... </body> </html>– she pasted some code she had by.
As things of yore began with blank slates,
So do things now, with Googled templates.
To that, she added some divs and such things—
An hour in the zone, a mode coding oft brings.
Styling comes next in this meticulous process,
So she makes a new file called “style.css”.
She fills it with words that make no sense together:
Background, position, overflow, and hover.
body {
background: #000 url(img/bg-stone.png);
color: #212224;
}
a {
color:#000;
}
a:visited {
color:#777;
}
a:active, a:hover {
color:#9f9;
}
#wrapper {
position: relative;
width: 100%;
overflow: hidden;
}The effects of this file are not obvious at first,But trust a web designer to know that it works:
Between the web server and your computer screen,
Your browser interprets and makes #9f9 green.
After it’s done, she tests it and discovers
It looks completely wrong in Internet Explorer.
It takes three hours to enact all the solutions,
Props to Google and Stack Overflow discussions.
At long last, after an hour’s additional fiddling,
Our designer’s given up and gone on to sleeping.
The next day brings five more hours of coding
Before everything’s fit for public consuming.
But wait! There’s a final, most difficult step:
Install a CMS for that additional geek cred.
Several hours ensue full of FTP witchery,
MySQL fumbling and PHP hackery.
Somehow, everything’s shoehorned in place;
Not a bracket out of line, not a line-break misplaced.
It works in all browsers and even on iPhone,
Or so goes my dream that reality doth disown.
This tale continues now and forever,
A designer’s job ends not, not now nor ever.
So if you’ve time to read a poem so wordy,
Take a look at my work, though it’s a little nerdy:
For this website, I’ve toiled for better or worse,
I hope your own task will be helped if you view my source.
* That was “comedy” in the Middle English sense, in case you were wondering.