The Bike Shed: Part 3 (The End)

The Bike Shed is finally alive and kicking!

It’s been a pretty adventurous 4 weeks and I’ve learnt a HUGE amount during the whole process. I’m so glad I took a few days off from work to properly sit down and fidde with bits here and there, otherwise I’d be posting this on the other side of Christmas!

Things I’ve learnt —

Work on the general stuff first before you start delving into details
This was so difficult for me to do as I’m used to being a bit of a fiddler—I can’t move onto something else until that thing I’m fiddling with is perfect. I often found myself moving an element left and right for a good amount of time before I realised that I hadn’t even got all the content for the site together.

Collate all your content—text and images—before you start marking anything up
I was trying to do everything at the same time and it was time-consuming and unproductive. I’d be marking-up a page but would then be trying to find suitable images for it; it took longer than expected and I’d forget what I was doing before.

Just bang out your CSS first, then tidy it up at the end
Again, my fiddling habit…the minute I stopped and just wrote out all the CSS first, it was so much easier and less stressful to do! I waited until the end to look through the CSS and fine-tuned it so that unnecessary rules were cut and shorthands came into play.

Some new CSS rules
Thanks to Dan Cederholm and his very helpful CSS3 for Web Designers book, I managed to implement a couple of his examples into my site such as using transition and transform:scale on images to make the user experience a little more exciting.

Chris Coyier is amazing
He’s (figuratively) held my hand throughout this whole project. His site CSS Tricks has saved me so many times and I’m almost definitely going to be on it everyday from now on. I pretty much used it religiously and found reading the comments really helpful and a good source to find other stuff too.

Some of the ideas/sketches/scribbles made during the project: