Perhaps the word "redesign" is a tad much, given that the site never really had a design to start with...

When I decided it was time to make a proper effort at a personal website, rather than the mess of cobbled together pages I used to have, I started with a trial version of the Dreamweaver program. Everyone knows that Dreamweaver is the best web design tool so it seemed like the way to go. And it was, for a while. But as I got more confident, and my design got more involved, Dreamweaver and I started to loose touch. Tables are a hopeless device for laying things out, and the Dreamweaver GUI is totally user-unfriendly. That's not to say I blame Dreamweaver, since I don't, but the reality is if you want your web pages to behave sensibly you really need to understand what is going on. If you can't predict what will happen if you set the width of something to 100%, you're going to struggle with Dreamweaver. You have to control it, not let it control you. After 2 solid weeks of messing around with it I gave up. I'm sure good things can be done with it, but you really need to be an expert to get anything sensible.

So with that lesson under my belt I started from scratch with PHP. PHP is a great language, and I've learnt that HTML and CSS are best used as a programming combination, rather than a description and layout combination. So I wrote a routine to do the header, another to do the random photos, another to do the news, then wrote a template to tie it all together in the form of a basic page delivery. It made more sense to an experienced coder like me: break it up and write functions to create and deliver each part of the page.

The result is what you see in front of you. I never doubted that PHP was the way to deliver things like random photos, but I've learnt that it's also the way to deliver regular pages too.