I’m no web designer.  But I’m pretty picky about design, so I just couldn’t accept our little blog here looking like dozens of others using the same out-of-the-box WordPress template (especially since we’re hosting it ourselves rather than using wordpress.com).

Well, that ended up to be a slippery slope -  I chose a template as a starting point, and before I knew it, I had spent way (way) too much time effectively rewriting most of it.

The WordPress platform is pretty powerful – so much so, it’s sometimes used for content management even on non-blog sites.  It’s also relatively easy to deal with: WordPress saves you from having to deal directly with the back-end database, and there are a wealth of useful 3rd party plug-ins available for a wide array of additional functionality.   That’s great, but to get the visual look and feel of the site the way we wanted it, I was in for a bit of a learning curve – not so much with PHP scripting (which is relatively easy to reverse-engineer), but also with the CSS files (the ancillary documents that define the layout and style of the web pages themselves).

There was just  no way around it.

Making changes to the CSS was a particularly painful hit-or-miss process I was running out of patience for when I came across Firebug, a Firefox add-on for web developers.  The Firebug icon sits down in your Firefox tray and when needed, will (among other things) allow you to locate the relevant CSS code for any element on the web page, to make changes to the CSS, and to see the resulting change in real time.  Using Firebug is simple and intuitive, and I would recommend it to anyone with a need or interest in modifying website design and/or JavaScript – it’s an excellent tool (at least for identifying CSS elements and auditioning changes, which is all I used it for), and fun (ok, almost fun) to use.