On the troubles of web design from a non-web designer

The magazine of science fiction and strange tales has officially launched, with four titles, and more on the way! On the day of Red Velvet’s new (possibly last) album release, which I did not even think of.

It’s been a little over a year in the making, and plenty of lessons were learned which, hopefully, can be applied in the future. The number-one thing was web design, from the very beginning when I was wavering between Adobe Dreamweaver and a website builder (or possibly Fiverr). I had no idea how to begin, or what was required, other than you need a domain and you need hosting (whatever those meant).

After reviewing a breakdown between GoDaddy and competing hosting sites, I went with GoDaddy — in part, because it’s already hosting harrisonchute.com, which I’ve had for years. I was able to get both the domain name — “martiansun.com” would’ve been about $4,000 — and hosting, which in practical terms means a server. Boy, I spent a lot of time trying to merely conceptualize how to put a website online. Like, say you created a dummy html page on Notepad. How do you… upload it? Can’t be like YouTube, uploading videos, right? Where’s the “upload” button?

You can code in Notepad, but Dreamweaver is included in the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription I’ve had since college (don’t have the student discount anymore, though), and it’s what I learned in high school. The first version of martiansunmagazine.com was built with Dreamweaver, as a series of tables filled with content. Those were very difficult to adjust in CSS. But with Dreamweaver, you can sync the local files to the online server using FTP. Oh! I know what FTP is.

No, I don’t. And trying to coordinate my folder with the online folder — something called “cPanel File Manager” — proved impossible for me, even after a very close call. So, that’s around the time I learned that you can just upload files directly to cPanel. You don’t have to sync anything. Or, as it turned out, use Dreamweaver at all.

Modern coders prefer using programs like VS Code, which is free. I downloaded that and started learning how to code by going from issue to issue as they came about in redesigning the site. If not tables, then how do I organize content on each page? Can I have two nav bars on the same page? How do I have one of those image carousels, but with links and text? I got as far as I could into Version 2 of martiansunmagazine.com and hit a wall.

A lot of the YouTube tutorials on web design focus on ecommerce sites, but I was doing something more old-fashioned, in the days when webcomics reigned (or, at least, existed). I found this six-hour tutorial covering the basics of HTML and CSS, and was just stuck enough that I decided to watch it over the course of a week to see if there were any handy tips and tricks. Well, as a lot of the comments mention, this is an essential tutorial, and I think overall, it rounded out a reasonable approach to learning a new skill. All the specific things I was tinkering with were given context, and things started making sense. Grid and Flexbox were a major breakthrough. That’s gonna be a big moment in my Lifetime biopic.

Things except for the image carousel, which is now image-only. Trying to get text to display over an image correctly was a surprising obstacle. It never came out right.

But after hours of YouTube tutorials and trial-and-error — one of the worst episodes was removing “.html” from links on every page because apparently you don’t need it, and it’ll show up in the url bar! — finally, I had something resembling a real-life website, modeled after existing comic sites — namely, 2000AD and Dark Horse. Of course, the problem with the design itself is that there isn’t a lot of content that isn’t the comics themselves. How do I fill a home page? (The answer: with links to the comics).

And a side panel for news, which was another headache. I couldn’t figure out how to have a blog element on a non-Wordpress site, nor how to generate automatic previews like it does on my various WordPress blogs. The answer, eventually, was to create a subdomain that redirects to a WordPress site, which you’re looking at now. That took longer for me to figure out than it should have, and unfortunately, there’s nothing automatic going on. I have to copy an excerpt from here and paste it into the static code for the home page, and then provide the link. Manual labor!

Anyway, that’s sort of the story of how the Martian Sun site came to be, over the course of many months and tears. It would’ve been easier to contract a professional on a site like Fiverr, but this project began life as a creative portfolio to one day show to prospective employers. I’d like to be able to say “I created this” and that it 100% represents me, image-only carousels and all. Save the art, of course, which is both not mine and most of the site’s content — so maybe this was a fool’s errand. I don’t know; it just wouldn’t have felt right to send it off to someone else and sit back.

The good news is, it’s all downhill from here — in the good sense of that phrase. I’ll be adding more titles as they’re produced, while working on comics of my own. As I’m just as much an artist as a web designer, I’ve had to start this process all over for learning Blender. Wish me luck!

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