Interaction Design

Working with dreamweaver and getting my site up and working took a lot more work than I expected.

I really hope that I can learn more about getting a website up and running but I think it will take a lot more work. I think it was really good to learn to learn  how to make a style guide. Now i can design a site and know what to tell a person when they need to code the site.

What I have finished so far on my site is on my site at  www.jessicabutlerdesign.com .

This harder than it looks.

Do I believe this is finished? No. Not in the slimmest chance. Do I believe that in order to get any further on this site is to make this post. I feel that the site is lacking not theme, but in design. In building the site I found that keeping it as basic as possible was the best way to communicate the information to a fifth grader. I admit that I am limited in knowledge and if I understood more this may look much different. If anyone has any advice for the site than just let me know.

http://lawrencefolio.com/oceanindex.html

This was a very intimidating step.  Having very little background in HTML, CSS, and Dreamweaver, it was hard for me to leave my Photoshop/Illustrator comfort zone. Once I got some advice and massive help from classmates and tutorial websites I was able to stop hyperventilating and accomplish something. Well, for the most part.

I started this step by working with what I knew. From class I knew how to create the wrapper and sidebar, a navigation bar and links. I figured out how to implement the background image. Because my page layout wasn’t quite the same as the example we did in class some creative solutions were sought. I troubleshooted a lot; I got to understand a lot about divs and working with the files. I had trouble linking my pages in the beginning, but I looked hard at the files and figured out why they weren’t working; ALL ON MY OWN!(!!!!!!!) Now I know how to organize all my files from the beginning so that I wont have that problem ever again.

I obviously couldn’t figure out other things. I tried over and over to figure out how to get the hover over the navigation bar to change the color of the whole box; but it doesn’t. There were other things that don’t work how the mock-ups show they should because of lack of experience. I thought I’d be able to highlight the pictures on the “Observe” page and the corresponding simple machine would also highlight. I think I bit off a little more I could chew with the “extras” of the site.

There are a lot of, “should’ haves” and “wishes” for this step but I believe I did more than my best with my skill set and time. I know that I have a TON to learn, but I think I held my own for being dropped in the deep end.

My website is still in progress but this is what I have so far.

I spent too much time being overwhelmed by coding. When I dove into it, some things seemed easier than others but it confused me still. I watched the tutorials while doing it and, while they helped, I still struggled. I am able to have what I do for my site so far because of the help I’ve gotten from classmates and my instructor (thank you!). I got a lot of ideas during the class presentation today and am forming plans for better navigation and more pages for less content per page. I would rather not have my audience have to really search for what they are looking for.

Here is the link for my erosion web site:

http://www.bryantjensen.com/

So after going through this assignemt, I have have a new found respect for even the crapiest of web sites. I have learned that there is alot more information and orginization than I thought there would be. Even though I have never built any web site, ever, I feel good with how the little thing turned out. I know this was a first step and I feel I can only get better.

One of the things I would like to address about this assignement is the coding. I’m  sorry it is one thing to watch a bunch of little videos and think you get what’s going on, but it’s another beast when it comes to actually doing it yourself. It seems to me that when it comes html and all that stuff, you either have to know it or you don’t. I have never felt so clueless doing anything. I will say that once I actually put some code down and the connections in my brain started hooking up, it seemed to make more sense.

I know that we were told to just design and don’t worry about whether it would work or not, but I found it really hard to design knowing that it was ME that was going to put in the code and make it all work. It’s one thing to design, but it’s another when you have to gather the content, make your own images, and do coding. In the end, I was able to get alot of what I originally wanted up on to the live site, though not as polished as I would have liked.

The Solar System

HERE is a link to my live site!

Websites get really complicated really fast. Without having everything mapped and planned out in advance you’re destined to spin your wheels for a while

I was feeling really confident in how my website was coming along, but near the end of the assignment it turned out that I was getting caught up in minor details that didn’t really affect much, and overlooking other areas that were more important.

Actually switching my website’s gears from just a messing around mode to trying to get it to production was a lot larger of a jump than I was expecting.

here it is!

joshuaballeza.com/matter

It was hard to be able to keep up and find out how to do certain things on html, but I just kept referencing to w3schools.com and continued to research how to do things like opening up a link on a new page, or making photo text searchable, and also making pages open up in a specific location on the page. I also asked some programmer friends for help to be able to accomplish some of these tasks.