How to get my project off the ground? (a gamified study site)

Going a bit off topic here, but I think that there is a concerted effort to "lower the bar" not just for good programming practices, but for the most basic of human functions, including matriculating into adulthood. I see twenty-somethings and even thirty-somethings who are totally unprepared to be adults, working professionals, etc. The bar lowering that you are describing above is but a symptom of where business and the culture, itself, is heading at full speed.

 

Thanks for another response, deathshadow. (although the latest comments in this thread are now driving off-topic)

Symantec Visual Page was a 1997 release on Windows (earlier on Mac, I believe).

Visual Page matched amazingly well, and since my brain is more structured for logical coding than visual design, it found that simultaneous display helpful in connecting both halves of the brain. These days, I write all HTML and CSS in text editors and flip to browsers to see the effect, but the brief lag leads to less internal brain connection.

It's basically like creating a flyer in the GUI of a word processor rather than writing RTF code in a text editor and occasionally loading it into a word processor for a review. Visual Page sped me up back then.

Yes, I get it that frameworks reinvent the underlying languages. That's what makes me wary of them.

What I meant with "reinventing the wheel" in my sentence was that building a sophisticated responsive CSS file with a responsive navigation menu etc. took quite some time. That's the wheel I am not too keen on reinventing from scratch. The idea: re-use and adapt it for other projects. But then I better try to make it flexible enough to only need quick minor tweeks to, for example, switch from zero to one or two sidebars if they are desired, or back to zero if they're not. Or, in order to make color changes in the responsive menu quick to do, list the colors in a comment section to more quickly find them by search-match in the actual code. Possibly even split the CSS file into two (one for only the menu) so that the menu can be modified even more quickly. That's getting close to developing a quick-to-use modification interface. And that was my guess, that maybe frameworks try to do exactly that since decent WYSIWIG builders seem to be out of the game.

I discovered that in your message footer, visited, agree a lot with it, had some fun checking out your html and CSS code there, too. Quite instructive.