I’m no web designer.  But I’m pretty picky about efficient design - and moreover, I just couldn’t accept our little blog here looking like dozens of others that used the same out-of-the-box Wordpress template.

Well, that was a slippery slope -  I chose a template as a starting point, and I ended up (spending way too much time) effectively rewriting most of it.

The Wordpress platform is very well-thought out (so much so, it’s also sometimes used for content management on non-blog sites).  the PHP scripting effectively shields one from having to deal directly with the back-end mySQL database, and there are a wealth of useful and well-written 3rd party plug-ins available -  but to get things looking like I wanted them to, I was going to be in for a bit of a learning curve, there was no way around it - not only with the PHP, but also with the CSS (the ancillary document that defines the layout and style of the web pages themselves).

While I think the PHP’s pretty transparent to anyone who’s had any experience at all with programming and/or scripting languages, making changes to the CSS was a particularly painful hit-or-miss process I had frankly little patience for – until, that is, 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 to use.