Amazon Grace, How Sweet The Sound

First of all thanks to all my fellow peers who helped me out with my user testing on my site, both of you. I have had to resort to asking friends, family and basically anyone who knocks at the door to help me improve upon it for next week.

This week has been filled with illness in my household and I am suffering from a bad back which hurts mostly when I sit in front of the PC. I thought I would use this time to read and try and absorb some information that I may find useful in the future.

I was reading about broadband speeds and the fact that even though your ISP may say that you have a 4MB connection the fact is in most cases it won’t be working how it should. There are various tests on the internet that you can run but a recommended one that gives detailed information can be found at www.thinkbroadband.com. Mine came out just slightly below the 2MB that it should be but that is due to this fraction being used for ‘upstreaming’ as this part of the 2MB is less used than the downstreaming.

For my own amusement in my spare time I have been looking into capturing video, editing and converting to DVD. Just over a year ago I bought a Dazzle DV Bridge unit that cost me nearly £200. In just a short time the cost of buying a DVD recorder has come down so much that it is worth buying one to do your converting for you (providing you have analogue in connections) and at the same time you have yourself a DVD recorder for recording TV programmes to boot. Im looking into buying one of these in the near future. I have so many VHS Videos that could be compressed onto just a few DVD’s it would save space and be more secure.

I’m looking forward to getting back to college on Wednesday after missing last week. I need some snippets of advice on the magic of CSS which I have been using in my assignment 100% more than I used to. My website is practically complete and I hope to research more into CGI, in particular Formmail which I am informed that we should hopefully be getting a small tutorial about shortly.

Lastly, anyone who actually reads my blog and is in the market for a USB Pen Drive and your after something else from Amazon. They are down to a BARGAIN £2.14 for 1GB and £7.19 for 2GB.
If you want to buy something to make it up to £15.00 to take advantage of the free delivery then check out this website. Type in the amount you need to make it up to £15.00 and it will search Amazon for something EXACTLY that price.

Nifty, informative, useful.

Uptown Top Ranking

This week was my first time of being absent from college. I do believe that because I only go one day per week I should be able to attend what ever I feel like, however I was full of cold and so were my kids, also I didn’t want to spread my germs around a closed environment. I was a bit fed up missing the user feedback testing as I had my site ready and my form all ready to go.

I do hope my fellow peers can help me out here by downloading my Feedback Form and looking at my website www.dhubert.co.uk and give me the feedback that I missed out on. I have had a few people fill out the form already and even now at this early stage it is interesting to see what a third party will pick up on that I would be otherwise blind to. The website form does not work so please don’t fill it in as I am in the middle of trying to get this to be fully functional.

I am enjoying creating this website as it has a lot of new elements in it that I have been learning in my self study time. The main one being CSS. I can see the very important advantages of using CSS from a ‘cascading’ point of view but would like to learn the advantages of actually ‘creating’ the site using CSS language. There are lots of tips and tricks to remember when designing this way but how is this advantageous over a WYSIWYG way of creating a website? I have read numerous articles both in print and on the net but I still haven’t grasped the idea of using coded language to impress upon a piece of text to be padded by 5 pixels when the Dreamweavers tabular approach does this with a click of a button. I think I need to be sat down in a dark room with a light shining in my face to explain the benefits of when to use CSS and when to use Dreamweaver.

On another subject I have been researching ranking and search engines, Google in particular. Every time I create a new website I get asked the same questions as soon as it is finished.
Why isn’t my website appearing in Google?
Why aren’t I in the top 10 in Google?
When I search for ‘man’, why don’t I appear in Google? I’m a man so I should be there. Etc, etc, etc.

It used to be, a long time ago, that you just had to embed Meta Tags in your HTML pages with a title, description and as many keywords you could think of. Investigating it now it seems that things have changed a little, mainly to do with the vastness of the ever growing internet. You now have to add your website to the Google addurl link, this stops the big submitting programs from submitting irrelevant material in bulk. Even then you are not guaranteed to appear. You then have to verify that you own the website by inserting a page that Google will tell you what to name, upload it to the server, then get it verified. You then have to go one step further after all this by creating an XML sitemap and attaching it to your domain. Which is what I am looking into at the moment.

I am all googled out now but as a thank you for filling out my feedback form and sending it back to me I will leave you with this useless but fun link I came across while researching search engine ranking. Just type in a name and it creates a Google style logo for you. Here’s one I made earlier.

My Website is Neopolitan in Flavour

A very interesting day was had by all on Wednesday. I do like the little tutorial talks as I find this is an excellent way to learn, not just for me but for the whole of the group. This is how I thought this course would be most of the time but the bulk of it is finding out on our own. A follow up tutorial would be good in the afternoon after playing around and noting any questions you may have and problems that need arise or need solving.

Creating a form is relatively easy to achieve in Dreamweaver as all the elements are ready and waiting for you to insert onto your page. It’s the CGI script, editing and linking up to the form that’s the problem. I have usually always taken the easy way out by using a PHP script to process the form but I have set myself some personal goals for this website. These are personal goals and are not part of the goals on my assignment, they may be small but it gave me a chance to make things different this time.

The first goal was consciously going for a horizontal navigation system rather than a vertical one as I tend to do vertical ones all the time. I think it looks smarter in certain instances; however this particular website would have been more advantageous using frames to keep the navigation bar in the same place on each page. I stopped working in frames a while ago and as it wasn’t to be used on this assignment I decided against it.


The second goal was to create my navigation buttons using text boxes and not pictures. I have always used images to achieve navigation buttons as rollovers are easy to produce and you can use any font you like with an image. The disadvantages are bigger download times which was a third goal to try and cut down on. Doing it this way was purposeful in the fact it gave me a chance to learn a little bit about CSS, something which I have never used. I can see the advantages of CSS for cascading throughout but still have to see the value of using CSS as a way of actually creating a website from scratch.

Another goal was to use fonts that I had not used before, as this is a bit limiting with ‘web safe’ fonts I chose TREBUCHET. This changed when designing the website as it always looked different on various platforms, Apple Macs being the biggest to change the way it looked. Although Apple Mac users are not the target audience for this website it would still cut down my user audience which I wasn’t prepared to do, so I opted for ever faithful, good old readable, VERDANA.

This is the first time have used Alt tags throughout a website and can now see the advantages of doing so after some fellow peer testing outside of college, it was brought to my attention just how visible these are in Internet Explorer but not as much in Firefox which is what I use.

Thanks to James and Craig for their help in sorting out my CSS for me, getting it to do the things I need it to do is proving difficult aesthetically. I’m sure there are ways around it that I just don’t know about or have the knowledge to do. I think I will wait for user testing day next Wednesday to get some more input before I go around changing things at this early stage. What I think is wrong may be right in other peoples eyes. (which happens a lot in this trade)

If anybody wants to give me comments about things that are very wrong they can do so but there is still some ironing out that is still ongoing. An overall first impression is what I need.
www.dhubert.co.uk

Haven’t had a good analogy for ages but basically just tell me what the cake smells like and not how it tastes.
The cakes for Valentines day.

London Boys

This Wednesday was the trip to London that we had been looking forward to for some time. After a pleasant journey we proceeded to make our way to the tube where we got split up after only 20 minutes. This was the start of an eventful day that would see us sliding, drinking, walking, talking and shopping.

The main reason for visiting London was to see the wondrous ideas that the Tate Modern would fill our heads with, only to find that all the exhibits were closed due to industrial action. After a couple of goes on the slides that adorn their corridors, which was a laugh, we met up to find some of our group had gone to the design gallery which I wouldn’t have minded myself.

It was then a case of just wondering off on our own steam to meet up at 6.30 to get something to eat. I didn’t have a clue where I was, where I was going or what I wanted to do. I presumed there would be more of a plan and some tips on what might be useful. My only knowledge of London comes from Monopoly. It is not a place I have visited frequently and know much about.

It was interesting and an eye opener, I have never seen so many people in one city with 75% of them jogging. The architecture is awe inspiring, spoiled only by the masses of builders’ cranes adorning the landscape. Our group just set off with no clue and no plan, after looking for a tube station for nearly an hour we ended up in Soho where we made the decision to split up as we all wanted to do different things and with a group so large you could not please everybody. Even after splitting up, the idea of a good day out in London was all very self opinionated. It was a case of trying to please everybody by doing a little of what everybody wanted.

I got to know a few people a lot better and talked to people who I don’t usually talk to at college. As a team building exercise it was a total success, as an aid to my design development not as much.

High point of the day was when Jamie, Chris, Craig and myself happened upon, by accident, Trafalgar Square all lit up at night time (I took these 3 guys because if I had lost them we had a spare of each). We had a great laugh and each of us had our breath taken away from the floodlit architecture all around us.
An exhilarating end to a very interesting day.
Thanks to all who made my day a good one and I hope Steve will arrange another visit in the future so we can see what we missed this time.
On another note, to appease you guys who view my blog on a Mac and told me that the font size was too small, I have edited it to a larger font size in the hope it will be readable by all.
Let me know if it is better or not.