Midterm Blog

Kathleen M. Freeman
CIOS 157
Mid-term Design Journal

Audience
The audience for my web-site is people who are interested in photography. Ones who want to purchase photographs and those folks who just want to look at other people’s work. A website of three pages is certainly not adequate enough to meet that audience, but it is a start.

Color Scheme
I have been looking at different photographers’ websites for quite awhile, particularly those of landscape and wildlife photographers. Many seem to have dark backgrounds. Maybe they use dark backgrounds to highlight their work. I did use the Adobe-Kuler webpage to determine the complementary colors that were needed. I used four of the five colors in the set. The base color was the color of the letters in the banner. The background color of the banner, which was also part of the set of colors, was modified in Fireworks and given another texture. The background color of the website and the text lettering in the site itself utilized another color of the complementary color set. The wrapper color was the final color that I used.


Storyboarding
I did not actually sit down and draw a rough sketch of my site on paper, but I have been thinking about it in my mind. However, I can see the value of drawing rough sketches or storyboarding as the book calls it if one is designing a number of pages for a website. If one is designing more than 2 or 3 pages for a website, the ability to keep track of the design could become very burdensome. If it is a large website and more than one person is contributing to the design, storyboarding the site becomes essential.

Writing the Code
Writing the code for this assignment was a very definite learning experience. I looked at the code from our previous assignments and copied and pasted at first just to get started, but as the project moved along I got into the swing of things and the different types of code to format a webpage became more meaningful. I especially became more comfortable writing code to setup links for pages and items on a page. And using div ids for various formatting needs on different pages began to make sense. I still have trouble with lists. On my second page I was trying to use an image instead of bullets in my list, but the image kept appearing even for all my page navigation tabs. In CSS, if I put the navigation code first than the image disappeared, but when I put the list code first the image took the place of the plain bullets, as I wanted it to, but then the image also messed up my navigation tabs. So I gave up and took out the image code and let the bullets have their way. The bottom line, whichever code came first in CSS took control of the “ul” and “il” code. I was never able to solve the problem. I think a “div id” selector might work but I couldn’t figure it out for this assignment.


Internet Browsers
I checked my pages with Internet Explorer 6, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. The web pages worked well on all three browsers. The only major problem that I noticed was the Owlhoot banner in Internet Explorer was not centered. It was over an eight of an inch to the left. I do not know how many pixels that would be but it was noticeably off-centered.

What Did I Learn
The main thing I learned and suggest to others is to check each little section of code you write to see if it works before moving on to the next section. Writing the code for many different parts of the design, or changing many things at once if you are having problems is not a route to success. If one changes too many things at once than it becomes confusing as to just what changes actually caused the desired or undesired results.

My Webpage url is:
http://uashome.alaska.edu/~kmfreeman2/Midterm/KathleensMidTermPage1.html

Week Five Notes

Week 5 Blog Notes
I tried for many hours to attempt to modify the canvas size, and then change the background color. I was able to modify the canvas size but could not change the color of the enlarged canvas without covering the image I was trying to display. I haven’t figured out the solution to that yet, if there is one. Anyway I did complete the Modifying Canvas Size.

I completed the Ellipses and circles exercise. It took a little while to find the ellipses tool. I knew it was in the vector tools, but all I saw was the rectangle box. In Photoshop all one has to do is right click on the tool and the other tools become visible. With fireworks one has to scroll down on the corner to see the other tools. It is a simple procedure, but I didn’t know that till my daughter helped me on that. Lesson learned! I needed the Ellipses and circles exercise to complete the Mound button exercise, so that is my example.

I did the mound button exercise. The exercise wasn’t too difficult to perform. The trick is learning how to use the different tools in fireworks. One has to search out the various tools that the exercise directions give. For this exercise one cannot do the “Modify> transform>rotate 180 degrees” command before doing the “Select> contract Marquee> 1px command. It won’t work in that order.

I completed the Transparent Text exercise, which was necessary to complete a copyright symbol. I used the Transparent Text exercise with the copyright and current year symbol to attempt to complete the Custom Watermark Command. However when I tried to import the copyright and year watermark symbol it wouldn’t work, I ended up just dragging the copyright symbol image from my file to each photo. I am still working on import issue.
With these exercises I am very slowly learning Fireworks.

Week 4 Comments about Webpage 2

Week 4
Working with the CSS code was challenging. It was made easier, however when I discovered the practice CSS code on Patti’s site. The practice code gave me a template to study, which made putting together my code page much easier. The textbook has the information in it but I was not getting the big picture so to speak.
One thing I definitely learned is upper case letters and punctuation even in the comment section of XHTML code makes it impossible to validate that code.