James

James Kooi

Welcome to one of my many corners on the web, it’s here that I share myself as a website creative and professional by giving back to the community. My goal is to make things easier on other website creatives who are taking the plunge in this vast industry and for those who have been around but always crave more. I’m a freelance website developer with a fair amount of experience with many aspects of development and design so I’ll be touching down on many topics and sharing a variety of goodies.

Several years back I decided to teach myself website design and started reading basic HTML tutorials. Weeks later a friend of mine talked me into joining MySpace and fortunately for me I stumbled onto CSS. Used to customize profiles, I soon after learned that it was also the modern way to design websites. CSS tutorials were all over MySpace and I ate them up like no tomorrow, I lurked in help forums and learned a great deal. When I came across a div layout for the first time my jaw dropped and I knew I had to learn how it was done. Once I finally found out what it was I searched for tutorials, not many made sense but one kind of stood out from the rest.

Between a handful of tutorials I was finally able to put the pieces together and after a few weeks of tinkering around came up with a quicker and much easier way. Everything I read required creating an overlay to cover up the default profile, what I came up with was giving the default profile a negative top margin of 50000px. Bye bye, just like that with a few lines of codes, one to go bye bye and a couple to keep the header in place. I needed a place to share this so I wrote a div layout tutorial and registered my very first domain – feedthedragon.net.

Since then I’ve gone on to become a self employed freelancer doing design and development work as well as marketing. FTD was down for a while and I’m excited to have it back up so I have my own place to give back to others who are now where I once was. We all start somewhere and I’m going to do my best to make sure that FTD is a great place to feed your dragon!!