Monday, July 16, 2007

This weekend's big accomplishment

As part of my ongoing efforts toward generating income, I finally decided to dedicate the time necessary to actually building a store at Printfection. That's one of the other stores where people can sell designs they create. Cafe Press is the big one, and Zazzle is another. I signed up for Printfection a while ago, but the whole setup is almost completely counterintuitive to me.

But over the course of the past several days, I've gotten a little more used to the interface and the process of adding designs. The big hurdle, it turns out, is getting the store to look the way I want it to. Or--what I eventually settled on--changing the things that really annoyed me.

You can select a "theme" for your store's design but, at least as far as I've seen, there doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to do something as simple as changing the text color.

Now, I do know some html, which I have learned, a bit at a time, over the course of several years. And, what I don't know, I can usually figure out by copying source code into Dreamweaver (the web design software we have at home), and messing around with it for a while. Lots of trial and error. But at least it makes some degree of sense to me at this point. A little like knowing the bare bones of a foreign language, I guess. I know enough to be able to look up what I don't know.

CSS, on the other hand, is dark and mysterious to me. I probably could learn it, if I really decided to dedicate the time and patience necessary to learn it. But, when it comes to learning something new, there are good conditions and bad conditions. It is somewhat less than optimal--at least for me--to be trying to learn something new when it's standing between me and something I'm trying to accomplish.

Well, anyway, I selected a basic theme for our store, and the one thing I decided I just had to change was the color of the links down the left side of the page. They were light blue, and the logo Demetrius made for the store has orange and yellow tones.

All I wanted to do was change the color of those links to black. I looked up the code for black, and for almost two whole days tried to figure out how to make that damn text black. Lots of trial and error. Emphasis on the word error, by the way. I took some long breaks to do other things.

But I am nothing if not stubborn--especially when it comes to things that bloody well should be simple and straightforward, in my opinion.

Anyway, you may all gaze upon the results of my hard work, frustration, and overall stick-to-it-iveness.

Black links in the sidebar.

http://www.printfection.com/brainchild

Woo.


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