As most of you know, since 1998, I have been the webmaster and the designer of
pariswoman.com. From the beginning, I did not have lot of money to invest in
hiring a professional web developer for the site. Also the
internet and websites were still very new to most people around
the world. The connection was very slow, and the number of
surfers was still slow and predominately male. So there weren’t
many options available for me to invest in a website that I knew
would be a labor of love, bringing in no fixed or reasonable
monthly income.
Still, I had many reasons for creating this website. My first
goal was to keep in touch with other international women living,
working and networking in Paris and elsewhere in the world. The
second was to keep my skills up-to-date, such as typing,
computing and desktop publishing. Thirdly, I wanted to
constantly learn new skills, especially how to use and navigate
the Internet, which was becoming a key part of all our lives.
Learning to create a website with HTML language was the most
daunting of tasks and I ended up with utilizing Microsoft
FrontPage, which proved a bit difficult in figuring how to
upload files to FTP. If all of this sounds like another
language, that’s because it is, and the time I was first
undertaking it, there weren’t many ISPs making things easier.
However, I was lucky in that since the Internet was free—I
mean literally everything was free, even for the hosting
services -- all I paid for at the time was the connection from
my telephone line with France Telecom. It was extremely
expensive, but worth it.
Mastering MS FrontPage in English (a version sent to me from
the USA), I began building this site from scratch. When he
learned that I did not have much information or content to put
on the home page (only some introductory text and a logo I had
created from Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator), Cliff Lee, a good
friend I met while volunteering at WICE here in Paris, offered
to sketch some “highly fashionable” images of women in haute
culture for my use. At the time, Cliff was attending fashion
school for haute culture here in Paris; today he is working for
a very famous fashion house in New York City.
Using frames and tables for the layouts, I centered the logo
and added the footer of updated dates, the privacy and
disclaimer links, and the navigation menu, so that pages would
change when visitors clicked on the images. This layout proved
easier for me to update than to always change the navigation
links on each page. The website was nice, but it still lacked a
professional touch. MS FrontPage was weak on HTML coding options
– add tot hat there were many older web browsers that do not
support frames – and as you may recall, many of our readers
could not view our website properly.
I was forever searching for an alternative that I could use
here at home. Finally, two months ago, I found an interesting
forum for Web Developers. In hopes of improving our
design, I posted the site URL and asked for creative criticism
from members. The response was immediate, as most of them
suggested I dump the frames and make it more readable by using CSS coding. I took their advice and started to browse for
helpful links to websites that explained CSS coding. What was it? Could I use it?
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