Kiss My CSS

By Mark Rojas, Art Director

There are plenty of things I do to entertain myself such as eating jalapeños and playing with LEGOs, but my new favorite pastime is HTML coding.

The social media network Myspace became the norm in the later years of my high school career. One of the interesting aspects of the website was the ability to customize the layouts so long as you input code in the correct spaces.

One code I was particularly fond of was the “<marquee>” tag. Depending on the script, one could use the marquee tag to make images or text scroll in a desired direction. I recall setting up the code so a small image of Pac-Man was being chased up and down my profile.

Myspace has declined in popularity, but my interest in manipulating the appearance of Web pages has not. I enrolled in some courses at Chico State involving Web design and was informed, that since the Web standards are changing, not to buy books but instead conduct research via the Internet.

My Google searches for “How to make a drop-down menu” or “adding Web fonts to a Web page” brought many results and helped me learn on my own time.

I tend to steer clear from WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs such as DreamWeaver and KompoZer simply because I do not have access to those programs on my personal computer. There is something very rewarding about typing in different code commands and successfully getting the desired outcome.

As part of my art director duties, I wanted to update the TGC website. I searched around the Net for inspiration and found some styles that I thought would enhance the site. The biggest challenge was dealing with jQuery, a concise JavaScript that enhances HTML coding. The new slider on the home page required adjustments to the jQuery code to allow for complete customization to fit the new template.

There are a lot of amazing things that can be done with HTML, and I am hoping to learn as much as I can with the resources on the Net and the professors at Chico State.