As I continue down my neverending quest to become a halfway competent web designer, I am constantly reminded of how little I actually know. If you've ever done anything with CSS at all, you can understand how alluring it can be. Rather than messing around with the actual content of the site and manually styling every element individually, you can assign them all values and then edit those values in a separate, friendlier file.

The problem is when elements you thought were different have been assigned the same value.

Take, for instance, the header tags. h1, h2, etc. The IPB default skin is set up under the assumption that certain elements will always be displayed over a similar-colored background as each other. Maybe they weren't as creative as we are, I don't know. Anyways, this is a problem with a very high-contrast site like ours, which uses both light and dark backgrounds on a very abundant basis. I will often change one value to make it visible, only to find out that I accidentally changed something else rendering that illegible (or sometimes downright invisible), and I have to spend ages finding that other thing so I can change it back. Then I have to fix it so that they're either separate from each other, or - the easier way - slap a background color behind one of them and call it a day. It's frustrating in more ways than one, but I'm getting it. Slowly.

I don't know it all yet. Not by a long shot. In fact, I really only know a very, very small amount. But I'm going to make that small amount work as best as I can, and the more I do that, the more knowledge I add to it. I'm learning something new, and applying it to something useful and productive. It's a good feeling for sure, and I'm enjoying every step of this little journey. Even the hilariously awkward ones.

This site might make a Soulcaster out of me yet.