This is the screenshot of my second styled page. Though not really satisfied with the outcome of this layout, I managed to create the link buttons and the header through CSS properties. I started styling the tables and creating layers, but the hardest part was the positioning itself. I had to rely on the tables or cells in order to get the right position or place for the layers, in other words, the layers were inside the tables or cells, haha! I haven’t tried making a layout without tables yet, but as far as I read about styling a page without tables, it’s pretty tricky considering how to position the divs and layers. And I guess this will be a long, long way for me to learn. For now, I am satisfied with the little things I learned about CSS.

This last layout I did with HTML and CSS. I uploaded it sometime in April and had it online until late September. In this layout, I tried to create hover effects to link buttons in CSS. All the background images and borders were also styled through CSS. Also in this layout, I started to learn simple flash objects. The header which I created in flash was not really satisfying for me, but it was the best that I could create. My next step in lay-outing is to learn WordPress, the most popular blog engine as far as I knew.

Sometime in 2005 while enhancing my pursuit to layouting my website, I came across this new script or language or whatever, called CSS (I don’t remember how I found it).  CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet and is used for adding style to web documents.  When I asked my hubby if he knew about it, he said he did but didn’t thought of learning it.  He finds it easy to work with HTML, anyway.  Through the web’s many resources about CSS, I started using it first with the fonts, because I found it exertive to determine the font style, size, etc. in HTML codes everytime I would write a post in my site

In the summertime of the same year, my hubby purchased the Macromedia Dreamweaver, one of the most popular web editor then.  So, I said goodbye to Frontpage and started using Dreamweaver instead.  Later, I discovered how easy it was to work with HTML and CSS with Dreamweaver.  Plus the Dreamweaver Bible with CSS helped me understand how to work with CSS styled HTML.

Not long enough, after spending more hours in front of the computer and staying up to the wee hours at night, I had my CSS styled website uploaded.  And soon I learned how to style the tables, borders and images, too.  It was fun and it kept my mind active as I think about how my site should appear.  Below is a screenshot of my first styled webpage.

Lemback Home – how it all started.  When I had my appendix surgery in January 2001, I was forced to stay at home doing nothing interesting.  I had to go to school, otherwise, to learn Swedish, but the operation kept me from going out.  I had lived here in Sweden then for one year and five months.  One weekend, my hubby just thought of creating a website for our domain name Leimar.com which he registered in 1999 (Leimar stands for Leif-Marlene).  I saw him scribbled a layout on a piece of paper while in bed.  I was just looking at the paper indifferently.  One day, when he began to layout the site with frontpage, and while sitting by his side in front of the computer, it seemed to me like my mind was turning topsy-turvy when he edited the HTML codes.  It looked to me like a mess behind the website he was creating.  Then he began explaining to me first the color code, the letters and the numbers associating with it (which until now, I couldn’t remember well.  But I thank Photoshop and Xara for doing it for me).

In that same year, we registered the Lemback.com domain without thinking what we should do with it.  It was just a thought of saving it for future use.  Leimar.com was actually thought for some kind of a public site where visitors could chat and send SMS.  We had it running for a year or so but my hubby didn’t have enough time to update it and I was just beginning to learn.  The site had been my training ground in learning the basics of HTML.  When I decided to create a personal website, I thought of having it on Lemback.com.  So, by using frontpage, I started creating a layout in an instant manner.  When there were times when I couldn’t get the looks the way I wanted, I just asked my hubby for help in editing the HTML codes.  And I started reading then the book, HTML in 24 Hours, but unfortunately, the book is in Swedish that took me a hard time understanding it.  To make my story short, it took a year before my first layout was uploaded.  And thinking of updating my website often, I asked my hubby to teach me how to upload files in the internet, another thing I learned then.  Below is a screenshot of my first layout and had it running until 2005.

Lemback.com 2003