Lindsay Summerhays’s Weblog

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/CAT/CAT19/week7/olafacultytemp.jpg

Heres the link to my OLA Faculty Site… its pretty basic but I like things clean and simple I figure this will give plenty of space for information to be input.

I thought this was a fairly easy assignment. One cool thing I learned was you are able to use masking, I didn’t know that was a feature in fireworks, originally I thought the picture was just cropped. I do wonder why in this instance you mask the image instead of cropping it. It seems like if you were to crop it the file size would decrease which would make for a faster loading time. I liked this assignment I think it would have been fun to be given all the elements and see what everyone would have come up with using the basic color scheme and photos provided.

So I changed my mind again, however this is the final idea. I decided instead of going back on forth whether to do a web site for my work or a non profit I decided I am going to re-do my dads business website. He has had the site for quite a while and has not updated it for 2 years I would like to do a complete revamp of it and I have already sent him some Q and A forms and he is currently sending me additional information such as pictures.

I thought the suggestions for creating a new domain name were pretty practical and nothing really out of the ordinary. I do think that people tend to forget or look past some of the points brought up, like trying to use .com for the ending of your site. I think some people get stuck on the name of their site and so they look at all the options whether it be .net or .org these sites tend to get overlooked and therefore your site may not be getting as much traffic/clients as it could potentially get. Some of the links provided to check for domain names were also very helpful. It’s something I will definitely keep in mind when building my own website

The author of this article had a very valid point about comparing web design projects to print projects, how is one able to compete when there are so many restrictions and rules one has to follow while creating a web site. I can’t wait for the web to catch up to print where designers will not be so restricted on things such as using more creative fonts, I also wonder if designers will always have to design with other browsers in mind, or will we one day move past that to where the browser specifications will one day match up so that every page will be compatible.

Before reading this article I wasn’t exactly sure how your site would come up on a google search I obviously new that it would pull sites that had familiar information but I didn’t know exactly where the search engine looked, whether it was the domain name or just some text it found embodied in the site. It made a lot of sense when it explained that you will have more success if you put your key words in the HTML tag. It seems like the more and more articles I read the more helpful information I get as far as setting up a site but at the same time it makes me see more and more restrictions I am going to have to work around, such as the placement of pictures, tables, and text.

This article was interesting to me due to the fact that I have never put any thought into folds. Its strange to me that people looked at the fold as a problem on a web page. I guess I just assumed that scrolling down a page was just something you did. I never considered that some people just might not know, see, or realize that sometimes this has to be done to continue reading a story. There were definitely some good examples of what designers do to make sure that people know that a story continues such as putting text right at the bottom where the fold would begin, or a picture just something to draw the viewers eye to keep continuing down a page. I think this article helped me so that I can use some of these techniques when creating my own web pages.

Chapter 2 was all about color, how it makes you feel, what your colors could possibly say about your site. obviously there is always some difference in opinion but I thought that most of the representations in the early part of the chapter on the feeling of color were pretty on the money. When you see certain colors you respond certain ways I know when I see bright colors such as yellows and oranges its a high energy sort of feeling. Where when I look at red and black I see bold, confident, strong ect… I think when you are designing your site you have to take into affect what mood you want people to feel. This is a section that I will probably come back to a couple times when trying to define my site. I also really liked the link that was provided to us earlier in class for adobe’s color site. When I saw some of the color combinations that came some of the colors I don’t think I would have ordinarily picked but when I saw them all together it really made sense and looked great. That is definitely another tool that I am sure I will always use.

http://bcts-potomac.aacc.edu/CAT/CAT19/week6/anim.gif

I thought this was a fun tutorial. It was extremely easy making one transition to the next with the duplicate key. I found it was cool that you could make simple animation without having to use programs such as flash.

For my final project I want to design a website for my current employer. I work in the Property Management department and we have a program called Opportanities. I would like to build a site for this specific program. It’s basically a program in which people who are considered friends of the company can look at further investments of properties and entering them into our program. I think it would be nice to have a site where investors can go and look at a current listing of the properties, show are target areas, attractions within that area and just the Opportanities policy. I have spoke with my boss on this issue and he seems to think it would be a great addition to the program. I do not have a deadline on this project so I can work at pace with the class time lines.