Making Things Not Suck

So, my forays into actually making a website that looks decent have been suspect at best. I remember, I suppose during my senior year of high school (as I clearly remember doing this on a desktop in the house I grew up in) setting up a variety of incredibly amateurish websites done in the most basic HTML possible. I did it again in trying to make a Jazz House website when I lived there during my time at Allegheny (I'm not sure it exists anymore, as the people who lived there after I left were too lazy to fill out the paperwork and lost the house), but again, that's probably gone. I think the only reason that I have been keeping up with Murphspot (to the extent that I've been doing that) over the past few years is that it really doesn't demand that much in the way of design, and while I'd like to do more to control how this looks, the templates are good enough and my readership is small enough that I don't really care.

So, because I've never really done anything beyond the incredibly elementary, the whole "volunteering to update the lab website" has turned out to be an interesting experience. The current site was, it looks like, written in 1997 and everything has been piled on since then, resulting in a huge mess that made no sense. So, I've decided to make a new website, still depending on a template (because I'm not good enough at CSS to come up with a design that doesn't blow, but I'm getting better at understanding what does what) and getting everything else to work in a way that doesn't break the universe. Once I'm done with it and relatively ok with how everything looks, I'll post a link here.

And then everything will be fantastic.