The House that Mary Built

While I sit in a holding pattern on getting a portfolio site up (I need to spend money to make money but I sure dont have much of it right now), I decided to create a blog seperate from my sordid and silly personal life. Maybe I am just addicted to blogging, I dont know.

One thing I do know is that I finally want to do some better documentation of skills I acquire as well as what I learn about my own methods of thinking and how I go about processes. Take last night's Drupal meeting.

We talked about alot of things. While I picked up some new things about Taxonomy, Creating Content Types and the significance of Image Cache modules, I also came home with a better understanding of how I view the overall design and development of a website.

Being a designer with at least a bit of versatility, I find myself equating a website to a house. In a traditional website, the navigation system would be like the house's blueprints. Add walls to the house with Layout. The lighting and plumbing would probably be things like functional code such as Javascript or PHP which add certain functions such as echoing a statement or conditionals. When it comes to my specialty of the look and feel, that would probably be the landscaping round the building, the house paint job and interior decorations such as wallpaper and those cute checkered kitchen floors.

For Wordpress and Drupal, its pretty much the same thing, except my design is more or less called Templates or Themes. CSS is still used but the theming/template method just a slightly different animal in the implentation of things.

Honestly I never really explained it out like that. However all the questions floating around that people at the meeting were asking me about realy brought me to put things into an analogy such as this. For that Im thankful. High Desert Drupal crew really knows alot of stuff and they arent too gunshy about dealing with someone as new to things as me.