Going into this project I only had one goal: to learn how to code a website and memorize what the different tags and commands mean. Overall, I think that I accomplished this goal and that I was able to code a website that effectively summarizes my work over the course of the semester. I now have many of the tags memorized and understand how to use them to create the effects I want while coding.
When it comes to the design of my website, I can’t really say much about my design choices since I mostly followed the videos. I picked a portrait of myself at marching band because I thought it showed a bit of my personality and some of the other things I do besides class work. For the colors of my website, I mostly pulled colors from my portrait image, altering each one slightly by making them lighter in order to make the whole color scheme more readable. I also decided to do design a header element in Illustrator to help make a statement and made it the dark burgundy red from my color scheme. I’ll admit I’m not fully satisfied with this component though, because it did create some extra empty space that makes it rather unbalanced, so this is something I would try and alter in the future. Finally, I decided to widen the layout so there wasn’t so much extra blank space on the sides.
Over the course of developing my website I didn’t have many issues, as I utilized the instructional videos for this project. My biggest issue came from trying to add or change things in the code that weren’t included in the instructional videos. Sometimes, the changes were easy as I just needed to use a command that we had already learned or used somewhere else. In other cases, such as keeping my header image from repeating, I had to look up online how to code the effect I wanted. Luckily though, the internet had most of the answers I needed and I was able to figure out how to make my website the way I wanted to.
In the future, when coding I want to spend some more time learning how to use sections, divs, ids, and classes, because that was something that I had trouble understanding while developing my magazine. Even though I was able to get the effects I wanted because I watched the videos I didn’t truly understand the concepts I was using. Due to this, I want to spend some more time utilizing those commands and effects in the future when I code so I can better understand what they do for a website.