Following along with Gwen Bell's the Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, the official question for today is:

Day 3: The Article That Blew You Away!

One of my favorite Twitterers (or is that Twits?) is Smashing Magazine. When a link to one of their articles pops up, I figure I might as well refresh my beverage and plan on a few minutes of break time because I'm going to need the time to digest it. One day in March, the topic was Backgrounds in Web Design: Examples and Best Practices.

This was a topic that I had been pondering. My background is in print publications. I've got a flair for design. But I found myself stuck using rectangles with borders for most of my web themes. I had hit a wall with CSS and kept spinning my wheels.

As I scanned the page, most designs seems well outside my skill set. So I looked more closely, read the descriptions and visited every single site. Then I bookmarked the article. Next I sketched out a new design for my Disney World guide web site and began figuring out how to apply backgrounds to accomplish a vision that that had been percolating for months.

In the end, I learned much about CCS and Drupal theming ... and moved much closer to my vision. That's the design I've implemented so far, which got a nice thumbs-up from my knows-all-things-trendy daughter. I created all the background graphics from scratch, thank you very much.

And thank you, Smashing Magazine, for the inspiration and guidance!