Wait, somebody told you that building a website was easy?  And you fell for it?  Now that the damage is done and you have come to the realization that you have gotten in way over your head let me give you a few tips that will help you learn the basics of website design.

Ok, I was kidding.  You are hosed.  That burning feeling, it’s the stupid.  If you’re in luck then you can cancel your web hosting account and get your money back.  If not, then you are really fucked.  Seriously.  You must have known that it was too good to be true.  How can designing a website be easy when you don’t even know what HTML stands for.  I hate to break it to you but the only way you are going to have a decent looking website is to pay someone to design it for you.  Reality bites.

Let’s be real.  Before you even consider trying to build your own website maybe you should start with something easy like learning the difference between the address bar and the search bar in your browser.  And that is another thing.  Do you even know what a browser is?  Exactly.  I cannot stress this enough, you DO NOT WANT TO DESIGN YOUR OWN WEBSITE!  It will only bring you misery.  And, by some stroke of pure luck, you do manage to put together a few, very poorly designed web pages the next thing you will experience is the agonizing reality that you’ll never turn up in any of the search engines.  Listen to me folks, I am an expert.  You do not want this much misery in your life.

If I can persuade even one person to not design their own website then I feel that I have helped make one life better.

The image above shows you why all versions of Internet Explorer suck ass.  Internet Explorer is such a dumb and buggy browser that it cannot interpret the CSS behind this WordPress theme.  If you view my site in Firefox, Chrome or Safari then you would see that the contents below the sidebar headings should be displayed in a gray box that should align directly below the heading graphic.  But the screenshot I have shown you is from this same site viewed in Internet Explorer 8.  There is an obvious difference.  And this issue is not just with Internet Explorer 8 but will most versions of Internet Explorer.  It is a real pain in the ass for anyone who designs websites.  And because Internet Explorer is the dominant browser we all take it in the ass.

I could tweek the layout of this theme and try to correct for it but I rarely view anything in Internet Explorer and the rest of the world can just deal with it.  Luckily this little imperfection with my sidebar is not as bad as some pages I have designed in the past and I’m not that motivated at the moment to try and correct for it.  It would just be nice if Microsoft would do a better job with the browser that they force down peoples throats.