(Besides the blog, of course...)
In my latest web project I had to create a seamless background, then the teacher kept adding more and more to the project until we made a basic site. So now the project is a bio about us, what our job is, favorite color, what annoys us, etc. In order to make the website look like this we were told several new types of code in order to do it. First we went into photoshop with an image of concrete. Next we needed to make the image seamless so that it would show up as one big image instead of hundreds of small images. Then we were told to change the color, I decided to go green and make it look like grass. After that we took the image into Textmate (the program we have been using for code) and used it for the background. Then we had to make a Div tag which is the semi-transparent box you see around the text. Its main purpose is a way to group certain amounts of content and you can change everything to the same look because of the Div. After that we were told to put a picture of ourselves on the website.
It was not entirely smooth sailing throughout this project and I did run into a few problems. The first thing was we had been given the project on a Friday and by the time Monday had rolled back around I had forgotten some of the important code I needed, thankfully someone I was sitting next to was very helpful and showed me what to do. Another problem I had was with the font style, for some reason only half of my text would change to the font I wanted and the other half stayed as the default. Eventually the teacher came over and helped me out and things were back on track. I was very pleased with how the picture came out on the website. For that we put the picture of ourselves on to photoshop in order to lighten it up so we didn't look like we had grey skin. For the most part it worked pretty well and I was able to eliminate most of the background.
One thing that I think still needs work is the color scheme that I put on the website. In class we had talked about C.A.R.P. (Contrast Alignment Repetition Proximity) or the four basic rules of web design. I would like to change it because my colors are all over the place, I have green, orange, blue, black, and white. It just seems a little sporadic to me even though it is pretty good contrast, next time I will probably change it though. I would also like to align my pictures better next time because of the way the second picture is hanging off the edge of the border. It just doesn't seem like very good proximity.
It was fun though because of the way we made this project, usually there are two types of code in Textmate that we use on the same page: CSS and HTML. HTML is usually more of the basic stuff where you put in the text and all that, CSS is more of the style type of code. In this project instead of using them together we used them seperately and at the very end connected them together by telling the project to follow the rules of the CSS styles. All in all in was a fun project and I am still glad that I chose web design.
