School Blog

August 18, 2009

Postitioning…

Filed under: Homework — Katie @ 12:46 am

I have to be honest, positioning is really how I learned html.  When I was learning how to design any layout really cause I started in high school (2003, holy freak that was forever ago), I saw everyone using positioning: absolute, relative, fixed and it would always be followed by top, width, height, left, bottom, right.  It didn’t mattered if it worked in other browsers or not, especially since everyone pretty much used IE, if it looked good then yay.

I found this pretty cool site, Learning CSS Positioning in 10 Steps.  If you seriously have no idea about positioning, then by all means visit.  You’ll leave feeling more confident.

Whether you like reading or not, Relatively Absolute makes positioning so easy to understand.

I love this site, Digital Web Magazine because of how simple it was to understand further stacking level, or the z-index property.  Mr. Batchelder really explained it well cause I honestly never understood why it was used or really existed and then this site just gave more detail really on the property.

August 7, 2009

My Compitition…

Filed under: Homework — Tags: , , — Katie @ 2:54 am

So at first I thought I wouldn’t find any sites due to the topic of Chip’s, my friend’s, website.  Boy was I wrong.  Although, I must say, there are some that seriously need some work done.

For example, I found this site Man in the Mirror and I know it has a lot going on, but I do like their little resource section on the right as well as the little blog area at the top in the middle.  Chip wants to do similar but not that messy are tiny, so people can actually read it. Just make the homepage inviting, so the user will want to stay and search for whatever whether they need something or not. Other than those little details, there’s nothing really I like about the site.  Just check out the navigation and you’ll see what I mean.

Another one I found was the National Coalition of Men’s Ministry.  The only thing I liked was the breadcrumb. Everything else is a mess. Especially the footer. They have a white image background for white links.  You can’t see them unless you highlight them.

Next one I found was interesting. All About God had a good layout, my only issue was the width of the main content, it could have been bigger.  I did like the organization of the navigation area. The branding/header area did not need the extra links I suppose, especially since it has the same ones at the very bottom.  Overall, a way better design as opposed to the previous examples.

Emale.org was a fairly descent site, just needed a bit more tweaking.  It’s also more similar to the way Chip wants his site to be like, just target a more younger audience with the design.  I love how they have their events page.  Thought that was cool.  With a bit of CSS, it could even be pretty.

Men’s Ministry was a pretty good site.  If you centered it and not have the navigation background repeating over again, it would be even better.  Even with it’s minor flaw I liked the navigation.  Other than that, pretty good site. Not much going on.

The one thing these sites all have in common though, is their target audience.  Its all towards men 30 and older.  I’m pretty sure Chip wants his audience to be 30 and younger at least.  I’ll be meeting with him again to discuss the site some more when he gets back into town.

July 28, 2009

I’m Floating…

Filed under: Homework — Tags: , , — Katie @ 4:10 am

I love floating layouts.  I do, they ares seriously easy to understand and make life easy too.  I need organization so floating seriously helps.  I found a pretty awesome site that actually talked about Breaking Floats without Hacks. Pretty cool way to not worry about browser (IE) issues.  I don’t design layouts anymore unless they are floated.  I think my only problem is the space between the columns.  I’d draw it for you but this is wordpress.  If you create a layout, a floated layout of course, put some greek in there and then make sure each div has a different background color, you’ll see the space.  I don’t like those spaces and I know the simple way is to just make the background color the same but what if you have images, background images (as bad as that sounds, its not) I’m just saying, when you use images instead of color, there’s a problem.  If anyone knows how to cure this disease, please let me know.

Other than that “little” issue, I love creating layouts, or really, design comps, on photoshop cause that’s really how I work, and then I like to play with the markup language.

Great articles down below if you have issues with floating.

Sources:

July 27, 2009

Semantics

Filed under: Homework — Tags: — Katie @ 3:27 am

I’m so grateful for semantics.  Back when I first learned markup language, html, css, they wasn’t really a set order of how things were suppose to work: you had the html markup tags and you just put them anywhere and everywhere you wanted so the ’site’ would work how you wanted it to work.  Now, thanks to semantics and the organization of everything, you don’t have to worry about a mess or how things will work because so long as you write the language correctly and ‘cleanly’, your skills will improve, the site will work (unless its explorer :twisted: ) and you just pretty much become a better designer & if you’re like me, instead having everything in ‘one big pile’, you have everything organized and clean, html-wise.

Semantics, HTML, XHTML, & Structure did a really good job of telling where, when, & how to use semantics correctly.  They especially gave really good examples.

Back in my old days of learning semantics, I didn’t even know that when you correctly design a website, its easier to find through search engines. Duh Katie.  :mrgreen:

Sources:

July 19, 2009

Web Design…

Filed under: Homework — Tags: , , — Katie @ 12:15 am

I can’t count how many times I’ve written about why I love Web Design. I’m starting to forget though, so this is a nice refresher.  All I can say is the reason I want to do Web Design is because I know I can be good at it.  Learning and understanding the script, code, is not that big a problem; the design aspect however, is something I’m still trying to break.  I’m almost there.  I’ve been designing since before graduating high school (which was around 2002/2003, yeah, I’m old), and the fact that I’m not tired of it yet or no where near tired of it, reminds me that this is what I want to do with my life.  And I’m a VERY impatient person; that’s another reason I know I can do Web Design (cause I don’t get tired of being in front of a computer doing html/css/javascript/etc).  I may want to throw a monitor or two every now and then, but I get that way about everything anyways :mrgreen:

I did some research on how others feel about Web Design. Found one done by Jeffrey Zeldman, Understand Web Design.  Pretty simple & straight forward.  What he says at the end, “The inexperienced or insufficiently thoughtful designer complains that too many websites use grids, too many sites use columns, too many sites are “boxy.” Efforts to avoid boxiness have been around since 1995; while occasionally successful, they have most often produced aesthetically wretched and needlessly unusable designs.”

“The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.”

To be honest, it made me feel like I was a good designer because I like having headers and columns and footers, it helps with organization; grids keep everything in order.

In another article I found, The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, Jason Beaird said, “For many web developers, myself included, the most intimidating part of the design process is getting started. Imagine for a moment that you’re sitting at your desk with nothing other than a cup of coffee and the business card of a potential client who needs a basic corporate web site. Usually, a business card speaks volumes about a company’s identity, and could be used as design inspiration.”

This is so true in my case, however, I think my block really did break goes if you go visit the article, he says to try and design a website based on the just the client’s business card and I think I could have.  Or at least, I had ideas flowing through me.  Yay.

So Thank You A.I.D because I really am starting to think like a Web Designer who actually thinks about the Users.  Honestly, before, all I cared about was a really cool web layout, awesome colors, and didn’t really care about whether the user understood the site because, well its just common sense to me and should be to others.  Now, I actually consider how long it would take just a picture to load based on its size and plenty of other factors. Still need to completely break the creativity block so I can be confident in designing sites for clients.

Would have a wrote more but I think this is long enough for you to read. :smile:

References:

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