So today I attempted to create a 3 column layout page for an art site I’m working on.  What I was *trying* to get was:

• a large image in the left column, fixed width
• the thumbnails to switch images in the right, fixed width
• the title and description in the middle, stretchy

What I initially came up with had problems when the browser was resized to 800 or smaller (text overlapping thumbnails, images and text wrapping incorrectly all over the place).  So after way too much time messing around with it, I finally ended up with something like:

• the left column floated left, fixed at 385px (including 15px of right padding)
• the right column floated right, fixed at 247px (including 7px of left padding, appearing as 15 when combined with the 8px from the li’s inside) and a left gray border
• the center column *not* floated, no width, with a left margin of 385px and a right margin of 262px (to give an extra 15px of “padding” on the other side of the gray border

This seemed to work; when scaled way down, the center stretchy text column floats under the large image and will wrap around/under the image and the thumbnails if the description text is excessively long.

I wish divs were as easy to work with for column layouts like this as tables…I try so hard to avoid tables because they’re a horrible faux pas nowadays.  Maybe I’m just rusty at cutting up sites, but bleh.

I love WordPress.  It’s so clean and pretty and easy to use and customize, its settings are not intimidating in number and its functionality is all clear and well organized.

I’ve tried playing around with Joomla and Drupal, but they seem so big and clunky and have a steep learning curve.  My experiences with trying to set up a Joomla site include a) getting a 404 error that refused to go away no matter how many pages I set up, and b) pages not showing up no matter where I put them or how they were reorganized.  Maybe I’m just a dumb user, but if I as a computer person have a hard time figuring it out, I’m pretty sure people less versed in maintaining websites aren’t going to have an easier time.  If it’s going to take that much effort to figure it out and get a site up and running, I may as well just keep it simple and build it from scratch, sheesh.

But I digress.

Er, actually I guess that about covers it. :)  WordPress is awesome!