Learning to design..

I have a degree in Communication Media.  Nothing about my degree prepared me to make this blog "pretty"...

By that I mean, I do NOT have an extensive knowledge of web writing script, particularly CSS, which apparently is the new thing.  When I was barely a teenager, back when the only internet to be had in Podunk, NC was dial-up, I had a lot of free time on my hands.  My parents were divorcing, I was an angry teenager, so I decided it would be awesome to create a webpage..  on geocities.. Does anyone even remember  use Yahoo anymore?

Oh yeah, Geocities.  Sadly, a few years ago they finally gave up, and my awesome pages are now gone forever.  You'll never be able to find the lyrics to Dead Bodies Everywhere anymore (and whatever other songs I took the time to type out the lyrics for), zomy.  Geocities wasn't too complicated for someone with a lot of free time on their hands, and I made sure to get Dad's money's worth for the internet (good thing we had the unlimited option).  So I had some .gif backgrounds that were tiled, different fonts, different sizes, different colors, hell, even hyperlinks to different pages within my website.  The internet was amazing.  Someone even commented on my use of javascript.. NO idea how I even made that happen, but I'm magic, what can I say?

Fast foward almost 15 years (omg that many?)...  I've used several social media sites..  Xanga, myspace, fb, others I'm sure I signed up for and never thought about again..  So now, all I want for this sparkly, new blog is a freakin "pretty" template.  Wrong, actually I want to be able to use my own photo for the background and for the rest of the page to magically come together the way I see it in my head.  Apparently, this requires an extensive knowledge of CSS..

If you know anything about me, you know I get headaches, migraines actually.  For some people, their thing is reading code.  but there's only so much of this:  ></\{}--prtofwrd, serif, 20px, /br, <> /a/p::, that I can handle.  My brain works best when there are full words, that don't even have to be spelled correctly (so says that spam email about benig albe to raed teh wrods eevn if tehy aenr't sllped crroetcly), or in the right order (I took Latin in high school).  Now, this hasn't given me a headache yet, but I can feel my eyes start to strain, wishing that I would stop, begging to read just a a few entire words.

Maybe CSS isn't really that hard to figure out, but if it takes me more than 5 minutes to change fonts, I'm too ADD for that mess.  I like the lazy option of seeing what looks ok, then clicking it, then clicking save.  Too bad this doesn't really give me what I want.  Siiigh, one day.