Web Design by Sheriar Designs: Impeccable Code | Beautiful Design

So, I’m looking in my site statistics this morning, glancing at the trends for January. I’ve been inching upwards slowly in terms of readership. My average went from 300-350 hits per day at the begining of the month, to about 350-450 hits a day towards the end of the month. But, what’s this number here on the last day of the month? Is that … one thousand six hundred unique visitors just yesterday? What the … ?

Excitedly, I look to my referrer log to see what could have prompted this huge jump in traffic and I see that, second only to the CSS Zen Garden, most of my visitors are coming from a new article on A List Apart. I quickly scan my brain … did I leave a comment on ALA that was possibly so enticing that readers were drawn to my site in throngs? No. I did not. So that must mean that I was cited in the article itself.

I go to the article and do a search for Mani - nothing. I do a search for Sheriar - still nothing. I start hovering over every link looking for my url and I quickly find it, just two links in. The author is referring to my little old 3-column Holy Grail example, and he’s calling it a good template! Granted, he points out that source order is sacrificed, but so what!? I’m cited in A List Apart! Whoooo hoooo!!!!

A Little History

Back in my relatively newbie CSS days, I was reading an article about various css layouts. Towards the end of the article the author talked a bit about the Holy Grail of layouts - Three columns (two fixed-width sidebars and a liquid center) and a full length header and footer. All columns had to be able to be the longest. All columns as well as the header, the footer, and the background had to be able to be a different background. Next the author wrote the fateful words, “As far as we know, it hasn’t been done.” Or something to that effect. Well, you bet I took the entire day off to devote myself to the task. And, much to my astonishment, I did it! So, as far as I knew I was the only one who had. Whoa.

I posted the results on my site and wrote a quick note to the WSG discussion board saying basically, “Hey - look what I did! Does it actually work?” I didn’t hear much back from anyone. I certainly didn’t gain instant fame as I had secretly hoped would happen. In short, I forgot about it. But - I left it up on my site.

If You Build It, They Will Come

Over time I started noticing that many people were finding my site by searching for terms like, “css three column” and “3 column liquid layout.” And then, a few weeks ago, I get an email from my friend David saying, “I see you are famous. You are being cited on css-discuss for your ‘holy grail’ sample layout.” Wow. Pretty cool, I thought.

Now my little effort has reached all the way to A List Apart, the cream of the cream of web development zines. Amazing. I quickly took a look at the template and was kinda embarrassed at the presentation. “I should pretty this up,” I thought to myself. But, nah. In it’s unattractive, simple state it has gotten me this far.

I did, however, make one small adjustment: I added a link back to my main site. ;o)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 at 1:07 pm and is filed under News, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.