In 2001, when I first came to live in my present house in Calpe, the hill across the valley to the east was a sandy brown. A desert hill, which made you wonder what had ever been grown on its ancient stone terraces.
It seems there was very little rain in Calpe in the 1990s—and I know there was a drought all through Spain. I visited Madrid two or three times a year in that decade, and travelled around much of Spain. (Of course I spoke much better Spanish then, before I came to settle among expats.)
Torrential rains came in October 2001, and have been coming back—several times a year—ever since.
I’ve heard that the Jet Stream is going to bring warmer weather in September and October, but it’s been raining through much of August this year. We blamed the drought on global warming; no doubt it’s responsible for all the extra rain too. Whatever the reason, the result has been to turn the Costa Blanca green.
Now there is a green hill, and it’s not far away (as in the hymn). It’s just across the valley from me.
In my last post, I passed on a useful CSS trick. Of course, this is of no use to would-be designers who want to stay away from HTML altogether.
In my last post I mentioned the importance of white space. In this respect, do your pages always look different on different browsers? Have you ever spent hours adjusting margins and padding in order to achieve an acceptable result in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari…?
Having chosen a base font, how do you best lay out your text? I’m not talking here about producing text (writing), I’m talking about laying out the text you’ve already written.
In my previous posts in this series, I have suggested a way of picking the best base font for a site.
I may comment some more on particular sites in later posts, but one thing has to be mentioned immediately. It is unforgivable to make unfinished pages public. One site listed in the Bulletin is in German. It has little flags which link to English and Spanish versions—or rather don’t. The links go nowhere. This is an insult to visitors—like offering a handshake and then tripping the other person up, as children do on playgrounds. It also suggests the company is disorganised and amateurish.