Or “Site Validates, but has Layout Problems.” Artist as Designer ready to throw in the towel! (almost…) Or just throw the towel.

In the previous post, I made reference to all hell breaking loose when you miss an opening or closing div.

Or maybe not. Last Wednesday, after a small struggle getting the footer to behave, I finally achieved what seemed to be success in parsing all the bits and pieces of the css and html to the proper php files, and my pages looked pretty good in most browsers. Not IE, of course, but isn’t that to be expected?

So I tested the pages in Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, IE7, IE6, IE5.5 and even an old version of Netscape, and the layout was perfect in everything but the IE browsers, so surely I have all the right divs in all the right places, right?

It sure looked that way, so I kept working on the smaller details and finished finding and creating the desired size images for my portfolio pages, and put the three portfolio pages together. I wanted to hard-code the main content portion of these three pages, and find a way to incorporate the static center portion with my pre-existing dynamic header and footers. I kept reading, researching, trying things, (and even found a big list of premade gallery scripts one could use, but none were just what I wanted). Well, I was done with that part anyway. I never did find a way to accomplish the hard-coded static portfolio content with the dynamic header and footer, though, and finally decided to put that idea aside for now, and start focusing on completing all the other niggling tasks on my to-do-before-going-live list.

Two days of efforts later, and I try again to validate my pages. Almost all of them get the same 5 errors: it’s missing a closing div tag (and I’m guessing the rest of the errors are caused by that). So I start looking around at my various php pages again, and lo and behold, I didn’t close the right-side content column after the second sidebar, so I fix that, and now, the footer is out of place on every page in every browser!

So I took all the basic parts from all the php pages, fitted them together, removed the php code, added back in a few necessaries, and tested again, and now it totally validates, but the footer’s out of place!

Why exactly did I decide to get into coding websites, and specifically, why did I decide to create my new design in WordPress? I could have been painting! Argh!