What starts with my nth attempt at actually designing a visually-pleasing website finally ends up being a fully-working website. Now I truly have a website of my own, designed and coded from scratch by myself.

(Of course, I use WordPress as the back-end. It would take literally years to develop a content management system such as WordPress.)

This is actually the first of many things. It’s the first time I actually use my own website design. It’s also the first time I coded a WordPress theme, and to be honest, it’s much more complicated than I first thought. As usual, after sleepless nights and round-the-clock designing and coding and problem-solving (lots of that), here I am launching the second version of my personal website, khairul-syahir.com v2. It’s the second version in a sense that this is the first fully functional website designed and coded all by myself. Previously, I’ve used themes that are designed and coded by somebody else, and I just throw in the content.

So yeah, quite a major step forward for me. But nonetheless, the first of anything is usually humble by any comparable standard, and so is this website. The code is still a bit of a mess, but  it adheres to the standards set by W3C. The design is not the best there is out there, but good enough. Truth is, I never had much success in designing websites before. This is quite distinctively the best design I’ve ever come up with so far.

One of the major pains and the cause of many headaches and hair-pulling sessions while coding this website is Internet Explorer 6. It’s a real pain in the ass for most of us web developers. As much as we want to, we can’t ignore it yet, since 16.94% of the total internet users still use it. Until that number goes down to less than 5%, we still have to cater for its needs when developing websites. So if you are one of those people still using it, please please please upgrade to Internet Explorer 8, or better still, switch to Firefox. The sooner we get that percentage down, the sooner we can all make the web a better place for everyone.

Until next time, enjoy your stay :)