Finished product

I am all done with my project (or at least I have to be as it is due today, right?) Building a site is time-consuming. Understatement of the year I know, but seriously I think that has been kind of surprising to me. Every time I go to my site I think “Oh, I could change that just a little bit and make it look better or sound better” It’s like it’s never actually done because you can always make it better and it seems so “easy” to just change a couple things and update the site. In the end, you’ve spent countless hours improving something that others may or may not even notice.

Most recently,
- I faded my header image on the right hand side into the background, so now people with larger monitors will not see that rough, finite edge of my image.

- I added padding to my main navigation to make the text more legible. Now that I have done that I also think I have redirected some needed attention on what is important to the site in the first place: directing teacher and student attention to where they need to go to start using the site.

- I finished adding content to each image in my database. I could have added many more images, but that brings me back to my original point that work on a website is never completed.

Website building is tedious. A change you might need to do to your site may not be a major one, but can take hours of figure out and perfecting. My header is a fabulous example of this. I really can’t tell you how long I spent on that because I’ve last track at this point. I will say that although something may be time-consuming, in the end something as simple as fading an image on the right hand side into the background may not sound like a big deal, but it really makes the site look more professional.

And that’s the main objective, right? To present something to the public in such a way that it teaches something while also appearing legitimate and scholarly. No one wants to look at a site that is poorly done and reads/appears to have been done by a 10 year old.

I’m pretty proud of the work I’ve done and know that I have learned a lot about presentation of digital material on a philosophical level as well as on a practical and utilitarian level.

I hope everyone else’s projects went well and have a great summer!!

Updated…

Alright, so after hours of trying to figure out what the heck was going on with my primary navigation bar, I finally got. So it should be visible in both IE and Firefox….. yea…..

Again, the site can be found here…

Website progress

My site is really coming along. At this point I’m just adding a little bit more description to each image I have uploaded. I completely changed my header, which I think helps in carrying the visual aspect I desired for the site as a whole throughout. All in all, I’m pretty happy with everything I’ve done and think my site is aesthetically pleasing as well as informative. I will be interested to see what you all think of it and whether you agree with me… Here’s the link to my site again.

HTML and CSS thingy

Alright so I have been working away on this and I think the most frustrating thing is that I can spend hours and hours on something really dumb and no one will ever know that I spent an entire afternoon doing it. One thing I have been trying to figure out is how to make the font size larger in the simple pages. I must have gone to several different sites and they all said that the code was (numbers varying according to how large you want the font). Well THAT wasn’t working. So then I found another site that said I had to have a + in front of the number. So I did that. Nothing. Well to make a long story short (too late, I know) I finally figured out that there is just supposed to be a space between font and size and no – mark. So I got it working. What seemed like it should have been so easy ended up being more difficult than I thought it would be.

The other thing I spent forever on was building a decent timeline using a table. I went to several sites and their timelines were really cool, but my skills are not at the level these sites were at and unfortunately I really couldn’t figure out how they performed their magic. I WAS able to manipulate one site using Fire Bug (I heart that firefox plugin by the way) and came up with what you see now on my site.

Comments are welcome. Let me know what you think. I will be showing the main page, Teachers, Timeline, and Why Classical pages in class.

I will be interested to see what you all think of the color chage I made from the plain gray to the pale red color.

Initial thoughts on the readings.

When I first began looking at the readings for this week, I thought to myself, awww crap, something else I have to keep in mind when doing this website thing! It obviously IS important to keep these audience members in mind. I don’t know how my site, being a visual one and all, would be very accesible to visually impaired users. I guess it kind of throws a monkey wrench in my original idea that students can be reached a broad level by catering to their interest in visual media. Obviously, my idea wasn’t full proof!!

In college I house sat for the guy who was in charge of Disability Services and would spend afternoons listening to him surf the net. I know that people like him completely rely on accessibility in order to surf the net, get information, etc. So lots more to think about and more to realize that no matter how much time I put into this site, there will ALWAYS be SOMETHING that could be improved or considered in being more inclusive and accessible of a broader range of audiences.

Design Rationale revisited

Alright, so I have revised my color palette. I used a website called degraeve.com/color-palette and plugged in a few photos and decided on a different color than the light gray for the links and navigation color. I have tried several times to put in an image I created in photoshop as the header so that I can use the Caesar font I like, but have failed every time. Here’s the link to the logo I created. At least then you all can finally see what the font looks like. I tried following what it looked like was done on the thanksroy.org site using fire bug (thanks Trevor, awesome), but I really have no idea what I’m doing wrong. I’m pretty pleased with the new colors I decided on. I still am using the dark dark gray for the background color because I still feel it makes the images stand out the best. I also have decided to change the color of the links as you hover over them with the mouse because I think it makes the site have a bit more of an interactive feel… if that makes sense…

I figured out how to turn a powerpoint presentation into a pdf file and then managed to upload to the server (go me, I’m pretty proud of myself right now actually). I went to freepdfconvert.com to convert the powerpoint into pdf in case anyone is interested in doing it too and hasn’t figured it out yet. Then I just dropped the file into my images folder. So here’s the link to the design rationale and I just noticed that I lost the font I wanted in the conversion process, so please see the link above to my logo to see the proper font. I REALLY need to figure out how to put in an image for the header….

Design Rationale

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Class was a help this week

I thought class this past Monday was really helpful to me in terms of critically thinking about the kind of message I want to send through my site via typography and layout. I felt like the exercise we all did in photoshop was particularly helpful and really gave me some good ideas on how to better present the main idea of my site without even having to say a word. I guess this week just hit home for me that you can say something to users on your site through color, layout, typography, etc. without having any text for them to read at all. Maybe I’m just over enthused and everyone else thought that the material leading up to this week was just self-evident, but I guess a light bulb really went on for me this week.

I’m going to try a few different fonts that I think will better present the idea and content of my site and we will see how it goes. I’m still pretty comfortable with the color palette for my site since I feel like each image the user looks it IS the presentation of color and I would hate for any site colors that I would come up with to interfere with a user’s ability to look just at the image. If that makes sense…

Wireframes

Okay, well I have been trying to figure out how to convert my word document to a pdf and I found a website that let me do it. If anyone is interested and doesn’t already know about the site it’s: Convert MS Word files to Adobe Acrobat files

At first I really wasn’t excited about this assignment because I had a little bit of trouble figuring out how to do it (let alone figuring out how I wanted everything to be) but now that I have it all done I feel like it has helped me be structured and organized in my thinking. It made me consider some logistics that I don’t think I have would have thought of if I had just jumped in and tried figuring out how to make my site just “work.”
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Readings on Design Concepts

I read each of the readings this week with an eye for application to me and my creating my own site.

The Wroblewski site was interesting and maybe a little more technical than I can fully comprehend in so far as how I can apply his strategy to my site. Way back in high school when I dabbled in HTML and programming, I always struggled to make sure my project “worked” and took great pains in making sure I considered any possible ways the code might crash if a user inputed something outside of my program’s realm etc. Frequently, the aesthetic appeal of my project was lacking due to the fact that I spent so much time making sure the technical side was done well. From my perspective, it seems that websites have gone more towards simplicity in terms of design; almost as if less is more. The technical side has become more advanced since the first websites sprouted up on the internet.
I remember one project I had to do in PERL for a high school class where I spent forever trying to get my code to do something. I was the only one who hadn’t moved on to the site design so I finally asked this kid behind me how he had made his code “work.” He showed me his site, which has this entrance way with flaming torches on either side of this portal of some sort. I looked pretty cool I had to admit. But then when I asked, “Okay, so let’s see how it works.” His site crashed. He hadn’t DONE the code yet and had just been all caught up in putting the stupid flaming torches on the main page. I think it’s more important to get the functionality down first, then worry about the flaming torches later. I’m really trying to keep my site simple so that I can do both technical and visual equally.

I liked the Mark Boulton sites. The one on the color wheel was something I was already kind of familiar with since I have taken an art class before. It’s always a good reminder though to keep in mind one’s users since I think it’s easy to get enamored of a scheme of colors only to forget that it may be a really obnoxious one to everyone else in the world. Once again I remember from high school when students would couple primary blue background with Primary red text. This couple will give almost everyone a headache and our teacher forbid us from using them. Boulton’s site on Saving the Spark was interesting because it hit home the idea that structure will help an idea to not die in the creating process. This reminded me of the week’s readings on sitemaps and wireframes. I tend to take on ideas that are way too big and end up overwhelmed when trying to complete the project. Keeping structure in mind throughout the site’s process made a lot of sense to me because it can only help in organization and keeping a schedule.

The Carole Guevin site on visual architecture was applicable to me as I am hoping the images I upload to my collections will speak for themselves and stimulate classroom discussion. Although I realize it is not quite the same thing, the idea behind my site is that architects at different points in time chose to include certain symbols, designs, etc, to convey ideas to visitors coming to these buildings. Like the ad she included with the sunglasses and milk, I think each detail and aspect of classical architecture has a message and I hope to capture that for users.

Similarly, the Erin Kissane site on typographic matters discussed strategies for getting users to read your site. I am constantly reminding myself that I can’t have too much text attached to each image and collection because users will simply just get overwhelmed or won’t read it anyway. As a matter of fact, if I were reading this blog post I wouldn’t even be reading this sentence and would be already skimming down to the bottom… Anyway, as I said above, I’m hoping to stimulate discussion through some commentary on the photos along with some questions for users in an effort to draw their attention to certain aspects of a given photo.