Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Random Websites

Hello people with nothing better to do than read my blog. I am back with another project that I worked like a whole 20 minutes on. What I had to do was look at sites and identify the "question marks," a question mark is the quick questions you don't even know you ask yourself when looking at a website because they are over very quickly. Mainly web creators use these questions to know what not to do on their website. For example...


 This website called Sunshine on Site was my first stop to finding other random sites. It didn't really work out so I put it on here. The main questions that came into my head was at first, where do I begin? There is both a menu and sidebar which made it very confusing to know where to find stuff. The other one I had was if that green button in the middle was clickable or not. It looked like a button but it could have also been a colorful title.


 Another wonderful website I found was the Passive Aggressive Password Machine. This site is pretty good if you are in the mood for a little confidence bruising as it will call you multiple names and hope that God has mercy on your email account. The main confusion with it was that all of the instructions were hidden under the green box at the top and it never said that you needed to roll the mouse over it to see them. The other thing is that unless it is explained to you you don't really know what to do until you see the directions.


And lastly, the Hotel Wifi Test which I didn't really look into that much because I was too bored with this to care. For starters it was sort of unclear that the pictures were links and you wouldn't know until you moved the mouse over the picture. Plus the fact that the menu at the top is so small that it is very difficult to see and have to actually look for it.








anyway there is my rant about three random websites.
until next time,
Jake Smith

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

The Paint Place

I have done it! I have finished my first client project!

Well... ok, so it was a fake client... Big deal! I still finished so that is at least something.

Anyway, yes i am back with another awesome website made by yours truly. This site is about all things paint for a guy I made up called Peter Painter. Pretty clever huh, i know, i'm so proud. But this site included what we have learned so far which meant we had to do it the hard way.

What we did was take a theme we liked from the list of themes given through Wordpress and rewrite some of the coding to make it our own. In other words it is another childtheme project. The name of the (fake) store is called The Paint Place. Isn't my teacher so creative and original? But all in all the actual product didn't turn out too bad. I used the theme called Kindergarten which was the closest to the look the "client" wanted for this site.

 This right here is my home page, it is two pictures because the screen capture wouldn't fit all of it in. On the home page it has a small little picture slideshow of random paint scenes, the Painter's Decree, and a link to comments put in by the users of the web (not really, those are just me).










 We had to include several pages that had to revolve around the idea that this was an actual site for an actual company. For starters there was an inspiration page that talks all about Peter's life and why he wanted to start the Paint Place. Nowhere, Oklahoma is an actual place, you need to search that up.








 This page we had to put in store locations, so a map of Kansas was put on the page with pushpins showing where all of the stores were located. The map even includes major highways and streets so you won't get lost.









Here we had to include a learning center page so I decided to make a program called the Paint Pals, i'm almost as clever as the teacher. It is a program for small kids where they can learn about paints and colors, but mostly to make sure that each child is happy with who they are and to accept that everyone should be themselves (except when you are yourself, then admitted to a psych ward). Because what child program doesn't teach that to kids right?





 Here is the brands page cut up in three parts. It shows all of the brands of paint that the store buys including themselves at the bottom because they mostly make their own paints. For this page I actually created all three logos in a span of about twenty-five minutes. You can probably tell that by the simplicity of them. But the three brands are Royal Paints, Rainbow Riders, and my favorite of the three Paintscape.





We also had to make a page called colors, so at first I tried to copy and paste the code for an interactive color wheel, but that ended horribly and greatly messed up the code. So instead I added a link to the site instead. It basically says the you can look at the color wheel and decide what colors you like, then you can go to the store and tell them the code for the color you are looking for.






This right here is the logo for the site which was the very first thing we needed to make. It was actually kind of fun to have to think up something from a simple idea as paint. There were some limits though; for instance we had to include the name of the company and it had to look "good" or something. All in all i'm actually very happy with how this site turned out.





Well, that is all I got for you right now
Until next time,
This is Jake Smith

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

The Wonderful World of Wordpress

       So in the huge world of my web class there has been some buzz of a little something called Wordpress. So of course the first thing you Noob coders may ask might be "What's Wordpress?" Well I will tell you that and so much more!!! (Because it's assigned)

       For starters there are two different types of Wordpress; there is .com and .org. Wordpress.com is a way for you to create a blog through Wordpress, where Wordpress.org is a "Well-Architectured personal publishing system," basically it lets you make a website. Wordpress was made in this world as an open source content management system and was actually based off another program called cafelog. In other words they are both a CMS or content management system as it was said above. 

       Wordpress is actually more common than what is first thought. It is actually used on a multitude of common and well known sites like TechCrunch, The New Yorker, BBC America, The Official Star Wars Blog (Come on, I had to put it in.), and Variety. In fact, out of the top 10 MILLION websites of the words Wordpress is used on about 24.4% of them. You do the math, that is a lot of websites.

       Of course though, Wordpress is not the only CMS used. There are others including, but not limited to, Joomla and ModX which are also pretty popular in the CMS area of the web.

Well it looks like I have answered everything that I HAD to. If you would like to see where I got my info from you can click on the links below next to the corresponding questions.

What is the purpose of Wordpress.com?

What is the purpose of Wordpress.org?

How did Wordpress originate?

What is Wordpress based on?

What is a CMS?

What large, well-known sites use Wordpress as a CMS?
LINK

What percent of the top 10 million websites use Wordpress?
LINK

Name two more commonly used CMSs besides Wordpress.
LINK


Until the next assignment or unless I get bored and decide to talk about something worthwhile,

Jake Smith