BEWARE THE JABBERWOCK!

       Yes that is right dear readers, I have recreated the absolute terror from the whimsical world of Lewis Carroll. A large cave is located in the deepest darkest parts of the internet where this monstrocity preys upon the lesser of websites. A place so remote you can never find it unless the beast is dragging you there to be devoured.

       Ok, ok if you really want to see it here is the link. (link) I am going to be kind enough to let you see the Jabberwocky in its natural habitat. I may release a murderous website, but I'm not so cold-hearted that I won't let you see it.

       So really this was a project that mainly focused on the CSS of a website (that's the coding that makes it pretty for those of you out there) and use just that to make it look awesome. This lesson was based off of a website called the CSS Zen Garden where it is the same exact website but with all kinds of amazing designs by ordinary people who know how to speak the language of the beautiful code.

       So basically the information was handed out to everyone and the goal of it was to make it look like a decent website. For my idea, I wanted to go with something that felt creepy without actually being overly creepy. Unlike my 'work of art' right there the website turned out pretty good. The sad thing was that I had to put names next to everything so I would still know what it was.

       As I went through the project I was very pleased with the results and came pretty close to my original idea, and the changes I made only seemed to make it look even more amazing. For those of you too lazy to click on my gracious link... I have added in screenshot for you. YOUR WELCOME!!!

       Throughout the entire project the only part that seemed to be really complicated was making the main picture. In order to make it easier I looked at a couple of pictures online and then did a sort of outline of it. The end result: Mind Blowing.

       Learning wise this was a good refresher for the most of the CSS learned last year. Mainly due to the fact that it is hard to remember all of it when you don't really have any of the programs at home, I mean what kind of nerd would have that at home. Ha... haha... Ok so maybe I do want  it... who are you to judge my life. Other than that there wasn't much new stuff to learn, after all the teacher was just like "here is the HTML. Don't mess with it but make a website. Make it look like you care." Apparently there was some bitterness on one of the days of this project, because the teacher almost blatantly told us to fix them up so it looks like we care, so I decided to leave early that day.

       All in all this didn't take me too much time, I had an idea pretty quickly and followed through with it. I would have been finished with it sooner but for some odd reason Dreamweaver deleted all of my code when I tried to save so at the most it took me about three days to do. The other two days I spent tinkering around with it so my creation was absolutely perfect.

       Well I have now answered all of the questions and my hands are starting to cramp up from typing so long. So, until I begin to feel better readers I am still as always...

Jake Smith

Don't Make Me Think

       You are probably wondering what that title is all about? After all, usually I just shout a bunch of techno babble at you that you probably need to look up. This time I can say without a doubt, will be completely the same.

       For this assignment I was forced against my will to read a packet and do worksheets, BLEH, and read about all of the things that make a good website.I didn't sign up for this, I signed up to mess around on a computer! But enough ranting, you want to hear all about what I did on the worksheets don't you.

       For starters I had to look for a website that was very distracting or it wasn't too obvious what exactly was going on. So after a while one was found that looked awful. It was called Partial Preterism and it really had no indication of what was important, all it did was throw a bunch of words on to a screen and tried to see what stuck.




A good example of a website that was the opposite of this was one called Background Burner. It was nice and simple and there wasn't anything really distracting about it, until you look around and see a sumo picture, I mean come on, you can't not look at a sumo picture.

So next was a terrible site where there is absolutely no indication of where to click until you look really hard and notice the lines underneath the links that are put in the middle of blue writing. If you are going to make a link make sure it is CLEARLY VISIBLE, otherwise it gets very irritating and confusing. Oh yeah, the website is called Liberty Van.

But on the opposite end of the spectrum is the center of the world wide web, The Website Center. It was a nice clean little website that actually showed you where you can click to go to other places. Thankfully you could tell because the links were together at the top.

So here is someone clever enough to make a website that shows everything wrong you can do with a website. It is horribly colored, the distractions on the website are too numerous to count, and the spacing on everything is abominable. This place is appropriately named The Worst Website Ever. This is an example of terrible spacing because I needed one and I couldn't use the same examples over and over.

 A great website with good spacing is none other that The Whitehouse Website, and I'm not just saying that to keep the feds away. It actually had good spacing and everything was clearly defined to where you could tell what was separate and what was together. I tried to think of other jokes I could put on here but I quickly got bored.




So, before I get into this one, here is some info you are going to need to know. Conventions are the use of an image to represent something under a different meaning, it has a synonym called symbolism. On the Walmart website (hehe, advertising) it has a shopping cart that represents the shopping you are doing on the site.





Finally, an awesome example of hierarchy, which is the showing of how something is important compared to everything else, was the site CNN.
 It had good example with different stories being more prominent that others.

That's it for this post, until next time,

Jake Smith