This week I finally decided to put together a new site for my company using just HTML, CSS and Photoshop. I’d been hosting it using Squarespace, but it felt like a really heavy solution for a static site. I also never felt as though I could get far enough away from it looking like a template — although I’m sure someone with more CSS skills could. Mostly though, the biggest reason is that I was never totally comfortable not owning every part of my site, and wanted the entire thing on my Mac.
Since I haven’t made any web sites by hand in a long time, I learned a lot — I’m also sure I got some things wrong and will need to tweak it over time. I found that using Coda and BBEdit helped the whole thing come together pretty easily.
Coda is great because the auto-complete works so well, and the CSS editor was really helpful. It’s also nice having everything in one app. The BBEdit features that helped the most were letting me keep all of my related files in a project and search globally across them.
The one thing that really struck me with doing it this way was how much it’s similar to, but not like programming.
