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.