The End

So I have my website done, and now I have finally got my blog theme done. Yay!

I didn’t get it done on the weekend like I hoped, but I did actually get it done. At the start I was so lost and thought it was impossible. But I worked out how to find the id and class names, and eventually got used to doing things without touching the html (and found out how to upload images, which for some reason took me a little while to figure out) and it all came together. I was so happy when it worked because I thought I was doomed.

I’m kind of undecided on how I feel about the design of my blog theme. I have looked at it too much, and now I’m not sure if it actually looks like toast or not. Also, I couldn’t work out how I could get the image of the bottom of the toast to line up properly with the rest of the toast, but I decided it didn’t look too bad, and I didn’t have time to fix it since I didn’t even know if it was possible to fix. But it’s there, and I don’t think it looks ugly, so I’m still proud of myself for actually learning how to do it, and getting all of my assessment in almost on time.

Blog theme…

Ok, I have my theme basically sorted out, and I’ve got it working with html and css:

I think I’ve learnt a lot this semester, because at the start I had no idea how to go about doing anything, but for this theme I visualised what I wanted, and then I knew how I was going to put it together. And when there were issues I had ideas about how to fix them. I had a few issues with this, like the knife was in its own div on the side, but that meant when the text was less than the length of the knife, the image that was the bottom of the toast got pushed to the right. But I fixed that by putting it in the same div as the content, so that the toast runs the length of the knife no matter how much content there is.

Now I just have to work out how to make it as my theme for this blog. I’ve shelled out the $20 to upgrade so that I CAN, but when I went to listen to the lecture about it, it didn’t work, and I think it’s too late (as in, the term is over) to ask for help. So I’m going to look up tutorials and stuff and fudge around with it until it works… which doesn’t sound like a hole-proof plan, but it’ll do for now. I’m hoping to finish today.

Website!!!

Woo! I have a website!

I’m in the process of uploading all the images at the moment, then I’ll test it and cross my fingers that everything works because I only have half an hour before it is due.

I won’t get the blog theme done, obviously, but I have an idea for the design, so I should be able to get it done over the weekend so it’ll only be a few days late.

New Design!

So, the day before the website is due… I have a new design! Woo!

I made the background myself using stock images from stock.xchng and I think it makes the design less boring. Then because the background is so busy, I made all of the content really simple.

So now I will hopefully finish it in time. I have no idea how to actually get it on the web yet, so I really hope it doesn’t take too long. I can see me running into huge problems and not getting it in in time. And I’m almost certain I won’t get the blog theme done in time, which sucks a lot.

Design Time

I’ve decided that maybe I can’t deal with the lame-ness of my design, because it’s just so boring. But I don’t think I have time to do a whole new design and make it work on my website that I still haven’t finished. Plus I still have the blog theme to do, which I haven’t started and have NO idea how to do.

I spent all of yesterday doing something for another unit, and showed it in my tute today and was told it was wrong, so I wasted a whole day.

I feel really behind and like I have zero design skills.

hopes and dreams

I think I finally have finished my home page! I kept thinking I was finished, and then finding problems with it. Then I would think I had found the solution, and get my hopes up and hit refresh… and nothing would happen. My brother told me that you learn to not get your hopes up, which is kind of depressing.

My main problem was that I was putting divs around singular images, and then setting an id or class on the div, I didn’t realise that you could just put an id or class on the image. Which I guess is fairly obvious, I just… didn’t think.

Anyway, I think it is all good now. It looks the same on both IE and Firefox, and I validated it and it passed! So after a night of dreaming in html for some reason (which was weird and not that fun) I’m ready to move on to another page!

Firefox and drop-down menus

Well. I downloaded Firefox, and tried my site on it and it did not work at all. I had used text-align: center to center my content, and apparently Firefox doesn’t acknowledge text-align for things that aren’t text so… I had a look around and found this was pretty common, and it can be fixed by using moz-center instead of center. So I now I have two body selectors in my style sheet, one with text-align: center and one with text-align: moz-center, and now it works in both IE and Firefox. Woo!

After I got through that I began to attempt to make a drop-down menu, which… didn’t go well at all and made me very frustrated. What I thought I’d do was have the drop-down menu as display: none, and then have it display when the mouse hovered over it. But I didn’t get that far. I got it to not display in IE, but I didn’t work in Firefox, and I had no idea what to change. But I have realised that I don’t need to have a drop-down menu (I read the brief wrong), and so I’ve decided that for my first webpage I can just focus on the basics.

After that… I went and watched Alien Resurrection so that I didn’t smash my computer.

Getting somewhere…

I finally started learning about CSS, and it wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. Even if I don’t know how to do everything at the moment, it at least makes sense to me, and I can just look up how to do it. Since I don’t have Dreamweaver, or anything similar, and can’t be bothered to use the uni computers, I’m doing everything in notepad. I think this makes me learn a lot more, which is probably beneficial.

Here is what I have so far:

 

I guess it doesn’t look like much, but I’ve already had a lot of difficulties. Like getting things to center! I thought that would be one of the easiest things, but I couldn’t find how to do it at all in the text book. And getting some of the text centered on top of an image, but not let its background go behind the image, was kind of hard, but I found out about the z-index and all was good. Getting it to this stage was probably the easy stuff, so… I don’t know how I’m going to go with everything else.

I haven’t attempted the menu yet, I guess that’s the next step. Also, I haven’t tried it in a different browser. I don’t know much about how different browsers affect stuff, so I should check that and see if it gets completely destroyed. Especially since it is supposed to display properly in Firefox 2+.

re-design

I’m pretty far behind…

I couldn’t decide on a design, but now I think that since we’re not being marked so much on the design as the production I should stop caring so much and just go with whatever so that I can actually learn how to do it.

So this is the design I’m going to go with:

Now I can get on with it.

draft draft draft

The first draft for the website design was due today, and I STILL haven’t worked my design out yet!

This is what I submitted:

I’m not happy with it. It’s not… visually exciting enough. It’s kind of boring. I like how the top bit looks, except maybe images of wood are over-used in webdesign? I thought if I used only a few bits of wood (instead of the whole background for example) it wouldn’t look to cliché, but now I’m not too sure.

I was reading an article on the 4 Principles of Good Design, and I think it will be a lot of use to me.  It talks about how to use contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity. I think contrast is the main issue in my design at the moment, in that it doesn’t have much. I thought the white background would give it a clean, open feel, but I think it actually just looks bland. So I will think about using more colour.

Also, I found the above photo on the National Folk Festival website, and I think it’s a good photo for showing the atmosphere of the event. I’m thinking about basing the theme on it: rough, outdoors, hand-made, etc. I might use illustration for it…