As much as I hated learning to do website design in the beginning, it has actually grown on me. The more I learn, the more it makes me want to do it. I still think my website could be a lot better and it was definitely a learning experience. If I was to make a website again I would not have everything above the fold, and would have a background scaled to 100% of the window size which I couldn’t do with my current design. Also I would experiment with columns that adjust with different window sizes, so that my website could be viewed the same on all different monitor sizes (example here - notice columns readjust when browser size is varied.
My blog theme is finished, and I found Geoff’s tumblr custom blog tutorial to be very helpful. I thought I would be blown away by starting from scratch, so I decided to customise an existing theme. It was good to understand the way professionals had done their code, and the exercise did enhance my knowledge of website design a lot.
With my debit card taking forever to come in, I have ditched the idea of paying for online hosting due after being shown a free online hosting site that didn’t spam and worked well. Why pay for what you can get for free eh?
My website took a while to get going with the hosting, as I had inconstencies in my code such as capital letters in the wrong places and also divs in the wrong places which knocked all of my margins out when I viewed the site on other computers.
Fortunately I overcame all of these problems, and finally have the website here for viewing.
With the website now finished, I applied for a debit card so I could get my online hosting worked out. Unfortunately the bank has been stuffing me around a lot so I am now playing the waiting game.
This week was about the final touches on my site. I added an image link to make my subpage instead of the timeline page being a link in my navigation bar. This fulfilled the criteria and I felt better about the timeline page being part of the history page rather than it being independent.
With the website ready for submission, and our extension being approved.. I couldn’t help but to go through and make some touch ups. I didn’t like the white border around my background and how square the background was looking. This was easily overcome by rounding the edges of the image in photoshop, and applying drop shadow, which made the image and the white border complement one another.
Unfortunately, I soon found out gifs do not support a transparent background, so I would have find another image format in order to have the drop shadow effective and without the image having a white border.
Jpeg compression proved to have a file size that was too big for my liking, and would take longer to load. Although the compression would be appropriate to remove the white border because the file format groups like pixels, so in theory it would probably blend the website background with the white image background.
With some research I came across the PNG compression. It is an image file that supports lossless data compression. PNG files also support transparent backgrounds, which is what I needed.
I used the PNG8 instead of PNG24 to cut back on file size.
I started with a youtube video, which was easy enough to insert. With my newly acquired knowledge of divs I simply made a second column on the home page of my site and positioned it with margins. The video was a promotional one for the 2007 stonefest, and all of my advertisements were for the 2008, but I figured it would be acceptable as the exercise was just to assure we could insert youtube videos I believe.
I had to have a search around google to include a file download, but this was easy enough to find. This allowed me to add a picture of the main stage for download.
Stressing has kicked in, which always proves to be a big-time motivator for me.
The text in each of my pages is formatted and styled, and its starting to look like an actual website. I added the background image in and, I am currently putting divs in to get the text where I want it. A div can be used as a kind of container or wrapper for content on a page. In this case I have put in a div with a width of 900px, postioned in the top center for the main focus of my page to go into.
I had designed my page to keep everything above the fold, meaning the web page would not scroll down. Unfortunately this proved to be very awkward with my newly made columns and wrapper. I came to the conclusion that I would make additional pages for the parts of the site that had too much text to be above the fold. These pages are ‘timeline’, ‘set times’ and ‘essentials.
So the holidays have come to an end. Shock horror. I am hating myself for the little amount of work I have done. Very lazy. I thought I would use a youtube video to demonstrate.
Ok, so maybe not that lazy, because I worked all holidays and had very little leisure time, but I didn’t get anywhere near as much uni work as I would have liked to have done.
I seem to be running a little bit behind in the class at the moment (probably because I have been working 35 hour weeks!), but my website seems to be coming along. After doing the chapter four exercise in our textbook, I got an understanding of how style the text in my website, which was fairly easy and made a huge difference.
This week in our tutorial we looked at putting a simple page together, with html. So simple it was just a list of files that linked to different documents. Although, being new to website design, it took some time reading through the textbook to grasp the concept that the website was going to be a number of documents which could be linked to and located if they were in the same folder.
Now, at the end of the week I have an index page with a list of links, each of which goes to a separate file that is a page in my website, for example artists. I have gone onto the stonefest website and copied all of the text into the appropriate sections, although it is still unformatted and a mess!
