Redefining Reading webpage exercise

These are just screen shots of my finished webpage for the article we read called "No One Reads Anymore?" Some parts in the middle got cut off, but this shows that I have a navigation, links, and also a footer to my webpage. 

In-progress critique of "No One Reads" Webpage

This is a screen shot of my web design for an article of text the class had to read. It still has a long way to go from here. My line lengths are still too long and I'm not set on the color scheme yet. This picture was taken slightly after the critique once I started adding things (hence the side bar with nothing in it). I know have to figure out how to add a navigation using online tools such as w3schools.com. 

9-18-12 Class work

In class work time was working with web safe fonts. We took information from a webpage and had to add styling options to the text to make it more interesting. We really didn't have much time to work on this, so I got as far as I could. The color isn't the best and neither is the typeface, but it was just for a simple exercise.

MU Design Layout

Our assignment was to redesign the MU Design webpage. This first idea was my original concept of having a photo of the building with geometric shapes overlapping. This idea did not work as I first envisioned. There were a lot of problems I found, the most being how long it would take the page to load with a picture of this size in the background. We were required two designs anyways so I tried something more simple. 

Here is my second design. It is just a texture that I created myself, but I think it is simple and modern enough to work as the back ground of the webpage. Another aspect we had to change was the header area... originally it had a bunch of teal circles with photos. I wanted to play off of the new classes we are now offering here at Millersville Design and also the new technology we are exploring. 

9-6-12 Class Work

In class today we worked on the box model with creating margins, padding an also floating boxes in our web designs. Here is my example of working in-class with taking notes. 

Also durring class we worked off of a pdf file that took you step by step on creating wrappers and boxes in Dreamweaver. I had a minor hiccup and found that all I was missing was a "#" sign, but other then that, everything went smoothly for me today. It is nice to get a refresher on HTML in this class since I have such little experience with it. 

9-4-12 class work

Today we worked with creating a css style sheet as well as creating classes and ID's here are my 2 pages using dreamweaver.

Lynda Videos 9-4-12

After viewing the videos on Lynda.com for this class, I learned a lot of different things about web design. Web is it's own medium, you as a designer, do not have full control over what you can and can not do. It is really something to think about just how little control the designer has over things. The web is constantly changing and you have to keep up with everything to create useful designs. The usability of a site is the most important thing to keep in mind. If people can not interact well with your design, the site has failed. It is also important to test your site in multiple ways while creating it. Browsers nowadays have standards, but you need to keep up with these standards and know how the web is functioning as a whole.

I also learned a lot of new terms throughout these videos, that I may have heard before, but never knew what they described. It was interesting to see the breakdown of the http address of a website and what everything stands for. I learned that you can use different CSS sheets for different devices instead of creating entirely new html documents. You can have one for the web page, print out, and mobile devices. I found this very interesting and also very useful with the expansion of mobile devices.

Another thing I really wanted to hear about was Java script. That was a word that I have heard before, but never really knew what it did when it came to web design. I think that Java script is very important to web design, especially now when interactivity is all people look for anymore. Alone, HTML is a completely static web page, I would really like to look into using Java Script and finding what it can bring to my designs.