I’m not just talking about the aesthetic beauty of a neatly coded page, but the beauty of the logic behind it all. I guess the musical comparison would be with a composer like J.S. Bach – you can simply sit back and enjoy listening to a work such as his Double Violin Concerto in D minor, but then you can also study the score closely and develop a greater appreciation of the truly flawless harmony and counterpoint that forms the backbone of such beautiful music.

One of the things I loved when I was first learning to design websites using HTML (or rather, XHTML 1.0 transitional with external CSS if you want to be pedantic about it!) was the very logical process of creating content in a very structured way using HTML mark-up. It’s such a commonsensical process; you start with your raw content, you categorise it by tagging it as header, footer, navigation, headings, paragraphs, quotes etc. and then add the artistic side of the design elements by attaching a style in CSS. This has always been a process I love going through – especially when starting out on a new web design project – but the thing I still think is marvellous is the logical beauty of keeping content and style separate, because if you want to go back to the drawing board you can just start work on a new style sheet and change the entire look of a webpage without having to touch the code of the page itself. How stupendous!

But the true logic to the art form of web design really comes into play when things don’t quite turn out as I expect when I preview a page. (Don’t get me wrong, it can be really frustrating when I’ve been working away in code view and I suddenly think to check how things are actually looking out there in the browser window, and upon seeing my page in the browser I think “Oh no! This isn’t how it’s supposed to look…”) All I need to do at that point is go into a detective-style mode and retrace the coded steps for the element of the page that isn’t displaying as I expected, and by doing that I can start to trace where the mistake comes from… and eventually I’ll reach the euphoric cartoon-style light-bulb-over-head moment and fix it! Ah, the logical beauty of web design…

Now I guess the challenge is what to talk about – but I think the best piece of advice I’ve had recently regarding blogging is to just be myself… so here I am!

As you may have read on my main site, I’m a freelance web designer who works during the day as an arts marketer, and owns/manages/plays in a string quartet at weekends, so as you can imagine life is pretty busy!

Web design is something I kind of fell into by accident but now I’ve started doing it, I really love it. There’s something quite satisfying about working on something that is so creative, yet so logical.

I’ve just recently finished a website for Ocean’s 3 – a rat pack vocal group based up in Aberdeen. It was the first time I had integrated a Facebook Fan Box into a site which is great as it allows the guys to update their Facebook status and website simultaneously. I’ll be updating my portfolio page shortly with a feature on the site.

I have a few of new web design projects in the pipeline; one for a drummer, some updates for existing clients, but the one which is most active at the moment is for a community interest company called Hear My Music. They provide music therapy for people with communication difficulties, including those who cannot use language as a communication method. They’re a relatively young company so it’s quite an exciting time to be involved in a project like this, when possibilities of how the website could help their company are still being realised mid-design process! We’re hoping to have that site live within the next few weeks…!

On the non-client side of things, I’ve had my nose to the proverbial grindstone recently learning some new programming languages. I’ve recently taken a couple of online courses with “professional know-it-all” web design guru Kevin Yank at SitePoint: PHP Live and JavaScript Live. First time I’ve ever tackled server-side scripting, but it’s really interesting stuff. Kevin’s courses were excellent and will hopefully go some way to helping me produce more interactive websites in future!

SitePoint have been really great recently in terms of encouraging people to expand their knowledge through these online courses – I’m also taking a refresher course in CSS with Russ Weakly at the moment – although it’s a language I’m very confident in, it’s always interesting to go back to basics and be reminded of some of the rather obscure things you can do with it!

So, a few projects on the go, a lot of learning on the go… it’s all good.