Why is it taking so long to re-style the site?

Well firstly, I'm not really getting to spend very much time on it. Ideally to style a web site, you want to spend your time in big solid chunks. Three or four hours at a time of complete immersion. Well that isn't going to happen in a house with a two-year-old and a three-month-old. :)

So I'm spending a little bit of time at a time. But even then, I should have been finished by now. At least that's true if I'd just wanted to tweak up the styles a bit from within the plone user interface. I've decided to learn something new along the way, so I'm creating the new style as a plone product, which means all the editing takes place on the file system, and the development process is a bit different. I'm also investigating the possibilities of getting a little further away from the standard plone look-and-feel; making the site design really specifically what I want.

I've also realised that to make good-looking web sites, my graphical skills are just too shabby. I don't intend to become a graphical designer. My "artistic flair" rating is about a tenth of what you need just to get started in that game. Still, I've started RTFMing The Gimp in an attempt to get my basic knowledge of the tools up to a decent level. It's very frustrating when all you want to do as tweak a couple of details and you just don't know where to start. My weapon of choice in this respect for the last several years has been mspaint, and that hasn't really presented me with the proper learning opportunities. Time to change.

But right now, that just serves to slow me down. Ho hum. At least the web sites are functional in the sense that if I need to put something on line I can. It just doesn't look as nice as I'd like.

In the meantime, all this graphical fiddling is still development work, and it's high time I got my subversion repository moved over to the new server. I've been wondering if I can just copy the relevant directories over, of whether I have to dump and import. I guess I need to check my versions of subversion, but I'll probably end up dumping and importing. High time I did something.