The Final Web Post (at least for the year)

It is finally the end of the school year, i'm sure we are all very excited. As a final project we had to update our index page (Which you can see at www.eravensonline.net/students/674jrs22). Throughout all of this we put up some of the highlights of the year including a photo composition website, our own animated GIF's and so much more.











My favorite project would have to be the Real or Hoax site we did somewhere in the middle of the year. I have always loved the stories of myths and legends and read just about every available book there is on them. In this site we had to make pages for several stories and then show them all in a single website.

This summer I plan on going to a retreat called Stubenville. It is a great religious retreat where several churches come together to meet and deepen our faith for God. I also plan to hit the pool if it ever stops raining. Even though I will be doing that stuff I also plan to help out a little bit as well. There is a thing going on at my old elementary school where people can volunteer to make and then serve food for the kids who are unable to afford it during the summer.

Next year I plan to delve farther into Web Design. After taking it for a year i have found it to be very fun and would like to continue to do it. I also see as a small part of it, graphic design, so this way I can kind of learn two things in one class. Sure it isn't the main focus of the class but it is definitely needed when making a website. All in all this has been a pretty great year.

Until I feel like typing again,

This is Jake Smith

Real Or Hoax

       Another day, another project finished. This time I have made a website depicting myths and legends that may or may not be true. This was actually pretty fun because I have always liked stories that sound almost too much to be true. When I was younger I had multiple books about those kinds of things and to this day still have them with me.

       My favorite story was one about this woman who was driving home very late at night. She saw an elderly woman holding a grocery bag and decided to help the old woman. She pulled up next to her and asked if she needed a ride home, the elder woman simply grunted her address and got into the car. As they were driving, the car stopped at a stoplight and was waiting. As they were waiting another car's headlights filled the car with light. The woman driving looked over and saw various knives and other sharp objects inside of the elderly woman's shopping bag. She then got her first good look at the old woman and saw that the old woman was actually a man. She continued driving until she reached a part of the road out in the middle of nowhere and started faking that the car had suddenly died. She told the man, who was completely unaware that she knew his secret, that she had a spare battery in her trunk and asked if he could go and get it. As soon as he stepped out, she tossed his bag on the ground and sped off. The next day she looked at the newspaper and was shocked to find the man's face on the front page, saying that he was an escaped convict. She quickly notified the police and told them the address that the man had told her the night before. In the end the criminal was never seen again.

       When I started the project I began to make all of the boxes of various colors that you can see by following a helpful video. All that really needed to be done was to make multiple div tags and then apply css styles to them. One of the easiest parts was making a css style sheet that would apply to all of the pages of the website. In order to make all of the pages, I simply copied all of the coding and pasted it into a new file and just changed all of the wording. After having my work double checked, I was told that I forgot to add headings and to put them into an unordered list. Next I decided to go with a sort of vintage look and used Courier New to give it that old typewriter look.

       After that I was able to finish with some time to spare, so I then made my own logo for the website instead of the default logo. When I was making the logo I wanted to keep it close to the original but also make it better than what it already was. I started with the words "real or hoax" and added a little bit of color to them. I used the old trick about blue being the color of truth and then proceeded to put a scale next to it because it is the American symbol for truth. Also it is the Candor symbol in Divergent, because candor means truth. It's nerdy I know but also funny if you think about it. Anyway, the next thing I did was make the hoax part of it. I made it look kind of like a fail stamp kind of thing and put the Loch ness monster next to it.

       It seems as though i've pretty much explained everything. If I could do this project again i would definitely spend some more time making the text itself look better, to me it seems as though i just kind of slapped it on there. I would keep the basic parts and colors of this website if I did do it again. I will soon have another post depicting the next project.

Halloween

In web design we have been making a halloween themed web page. Not only that but we also added in some animations that made the page look even cooler. Here are the animations we used.

Using photoshop we simply made two different versions of the words "It's Halloween!" then put them both into an animation with frames in the middle to make them blend. Then for the pumpkin we used different shades of a light colored gradient and made it look kind of jerky to look like a flickering candle.

Website About Me

(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.