I’ve been doing a lot of reading and watching video tutorials lately on WordPress site design.  In part, this crash course is for the legitimate goal of learning how to build my site.  I have to confess, though, it’s also because learning how to do something is a lot less daunting than going out and actually doing it.

Today marked a turning point.  I opened the hood of my WordPress default theme and got some grease and grit under my fingernails.  Yes, I suffered some scrapes and bruises, but it was a pretty thrilling first ride out with my souped up site.  OK, it may still look like a Chevette, not a Corvette, but I’m making progress.  So far, I’ve narrowed the vertical space in the header, moved the title and tag line onto the banner photo and added a drop shadow so that they don’t disappear in the graphics, added many more banner photos (all, my own, by the way), and added a contact form, in addition to a few invisible back-end enhancements.

What I didn’t expect was that web design, which I’d always thought of as a mostly “right-brain” endeavor, would be so “left-brain”—not so unlike the worm genetics experiments I used to do in the lab!  For example, there was this pesky 2-pixel border line persisting above the banner, which I could not get rid of.  I found the CSS rule, modified it, and nothing changed!  After more experimenting, without really knowing much about the structure of the WordPress parent theme my site is based upon, I deduced that the 2-pixel border was under control of a different, and relatively hidden, style sheet from the one controlling the bulk of the site.  Further, I realized that this hidden style sheet always reigned supreme.

Classic epistasis! (for you genetics nerds)

Ultimately, with my new found insight, I was able to obliterate that 2-pixel border by inserting ten additional characters into my style sheet: important!

Ha!  Web design—I can do this!