Columbia Science Review Website

When I first became the webmaster for Columbia Science Review, I did not know what I was getting into. It turned out that the Columbia Science Review's website was written in the old way of using tables to format and style everything. There was not a hint of CSS built into this website, the files were scattered and poorly organized, and there was way too much unnecessary text. I told the president of Columbia Science Review that this website was beyond repair, I needed to do a complete overhaul.

However, I did not realize the daunting task ahead of me. Where was I supposed to start? I decided to follow the practice of content to structure to styling that I learned from my textbook. The first thing that came to my mind was to remove all of the content that was superfluous. Each page was a sea of repetitive text that I knew no one wanted to read. After narrowing down the most important content, I began to lay down the skeleton of the website with HTML. After that came the hardest part, styling. I knew what I wanted it to look like, but I did not know how I would translate that into the CSS. It was simply hours upon hours of trial and error through which I was finally able to craft the site that I wanted.

Overall, redesigning this website has been one of the best learning experiences I have had. I learned a great deal more about HTML/CSS and even a little Javascript working on this website than I ever could have from a textbook. While I had dabbed in a few web pages beforehand, nothing compared to completely redesigning a website. Best of all, I did not see this as work, but good, clean fun.