Web Design Student
Millikin University

Jae Ellison

Learning Review

User Knowledge:

My User knowledge has increased significantly over this semester. I had no experience with Dreamweaver, very little with site building in general, and I was not familiar with html code at all. As a graphic design student, the only advantage I came into the class with were my limited skills in Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. However, know I am confident with Dreamweaver, and I feel comfortable designing sites. I have gained the technical knowledge in how servers work, and how to get your site out onto the Internet. It was frustrating at first but it is nice to have that knowledge now. I even learned a little about code, even though the class was not focused on that. I have often seen references to html code, but never fully understood what it is untill this course. I think the area in which I improved the most was in CSS. At first, it seemed impossible and I did not want to apply it to my site at all. Slowly, I got a better understanding of it and now I have been using it in sites I design. Once you get it, CSS makes designing alot easier.

Design Knowledge:

In regards to Design, I have always had a good eye for what people want. In this case though, it was a matter of getting the design from my head onto the screen. There were alot of adaptions that had to be made. There are things that people expect in a web page, and there are things that are more appealing on the web. When we began, I seemed to want to put everything in big bold letters and just scream out to people. As I went on though, I found that smaller type and more content was much more appealing. It also depends on what type of audience you are aiming for. I learned that you have to be very clear about the theme of the site, and what it's purpose is, or viewers will get lost and leave the page. It is also very important to have easy navigation. If the viewer can not move around on the page easily, they will not stay there for very long.

Managment Knowledge:

Managment Knowledge is another area where I feel I learned alot. It was really good experience for me to work directly with clients. As an artist I am used to having the freedom to create what I want. When you are working for a client you must be willing to change your idea, and adjust your design to fit their wants and needs. I also feel like working in groups has been a trial for me. I find it difficult to trust other people with work, and thats something I have had to get over in this class. I have never liked presenting things to people, and we had to present our sites to our clients in a way as if to sell the idea to them. This is a crucial skill for me to learn as a designer, because I will be selling my ideas alot. It is also very important to keep the client informed on progress, problems you might encounter, and how they will need to maintain the site after you have designed it.

Tutoring Knowledge:

Since this class was made up of different people from different majors, everyone had something different to contribute. It was interesting learning from other people their skills and their perspectives on things. It was extremely nice to have my peer's approval or opinion on something I did. I liked working in class the most because there were people around to remind you if you forgot something, or to help you in other ways. I hope that this people experience helps me in my career when I will be working with other designers. It's also really nice to have feedback from clients in a neutral, non-threatening environment. To be able to have constructive criticsm from my peers, Instructor, and clients was a tremendous help to me throughout this course.

Hands On Training Tutorial Responses

Chapter 10

Fun but repetetive chapter, I am finding the flash buttons to be a bit frustrating. They just don't work for me. I follow the directions in the book but when it is on the page I get a big F symbol, and then if I view it in Safari there is just nothing there. I'm confused.

Chapter 9

Chapter 9 describes ways to create layouts other than just using tables. You are able to using tracing images and layers to manage space. This way gives you more freedom in design. You can place things pretty much wherever you want! A tracing image is basically a layout that you create in another program like Illustrator where you have a lot of design freedom, then bringing that image into Dreamweaver and tracing around it with layers to mimick that design. It goes on to show how you can manage those layers and make your site as close as possible to that design you created in Illustrator. Using this you are able to pretty much put anything anywhere!

Chapter 8

Chapter 8 is the tables chapter. I have figured a lot of things out about tables by myself so this chapter was kind of a review for me. It goes over how to create tables, add and take out columns, positioning objects in a table and changing borders and such formatting. I really don’t have much to talk about in this chapter. I went through everything fairly quickly.

resume critique

Here are some examples I found of a web-based resume.

http://www.veroned.com/resume/web_resume.htm

http://www.quintcareers.com/resume_sample_3.html

I like the first example better most, but I thought the second one was interesting because it's a new graduate's resume, and thats the example I will be needing next year.

Example #1: http://www.sibilaribeiro.com/resume.htm
Example #2: http://www.holisticforgeworks.com/resume/

I really enjoyed these two resumes. I am partial to the resumes that are visually appealing as well as informative. I think that there is a point where visuals can complicate the purpose of the resume but I really think that these two did a good job of balancing their resumes. You want to have a resume that is unique and visually appealing because you don’t want it to be looked over. Something with some colors and graphics can really give it some power. It catches the employers eye, and is memorable to them which I think is VERY important. An employer gets a lot of resumes and you have to make yours be the one that he/she remembers.

I really liked example #2 the most. I just thought he did a wonderful job of interacting with the viewer. His information is all there and he has intertwined it with graphics but the graphics aren’t overwhelming or too bold. I also really like how he has easy navigation to examples of his work. Since that is one of the advantages to having a web based resume its nice to see him taking advantage of it. One thing I did not like was the little biography/story he has in the beginning. I think it’s a little unnecessary. It’s an interesting story and helps you get to know the guy, but a business is not going to have the time or energy to read about your childhood. I think that bit of information might work better in another part of his site.

Example #1 is a nice example of a resume as well. It is actually fairly basic in regard to the information. It is plainly presented and there is nothing distracting the viewer from what is important. He has a nice stylized header that adds a little flare to the page and his navigation is very easily found and easy to follow.

bookmarks review

I am reviewing Sara Johnson’s Bookmarks Case.
http://students.millikin.edu/~skjohnson/

I think she did really well with it. The links are all resources pertaining to Up Til’ Dawn ( the theme of her site). I think that they are really good resources people visiting this site might need. I think its really well organanized. Its very easy to follow and has a visually appealing structure. There is a lot of text here but I don’t think that there is too much. The navigation is well done in a traditional way. The previews to the links are sufficiently informative. I would have liked to see her take away the actual text of the link and add just a word to link to the page. Perhaps something like “Click Here”. I think that might clean up the page a little and make it more stable. Over all, its very interesting, colors are appealing, and the structure is good. I really like how she narrowed her site down to a single topic. It's very specific, and has good information.

Chapter 7

So, Chapter 7 is pretty much full of stuff I already know. It seems like I’ve already done all this but I guess its just because I’ve been doing it on my page. But anyway, the first part goes into how to change font properties without having to go through to every paragraph and change every one. First, you can change it by using the property inspector and dreamweaver creates styles for you so you can go back to that font, size, and color. It then goes into how to use paddings and margins with your text using CSS styles. This just makes your text a lot easier to read. It shows you how to align your text and how to make different kinds of lists. Then at the end you learn about flash text. Flash text is useful because you can use any text you want on a page and you don’t have to worry about if the viewer’s browser has that kind of text or not. It also allows you do to some pretty easy rollovers. That comes in really handy for me because I have been wanting to do that and couldn’t quite get it right.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6 was all about CSS and how to change properties of your whole site by using them. First, it shows us how to create embedded style sheets to change the properties for the whole page and then it goes on to show how to create external style sheets so that you can change hundreds of pages at once! It gets you familiar with the CSS Styles Panel and shows you how to create CSS Selector Types (this defines which block the change is applies to). It also shows how to create ID Selectors. These are important when you are wanting to have the same logo, or footer on all your pages because they allow you to target specific areas on your page for styling. Next, it goes on to show how to create Class Selectors. I didn’t understand this part quite as well. It is something about creating a class change in the xhtml code. I don’t really get what the purpose is except maybe to keep your code cleaned up? I’m really not sure. And last but not least, it explains how to create Rollovers! I was really excited about this part because I really want to apply it to my page. This is a CSS that changes the link colors on your page as your mouse rolls over them using Pseudo-Classes.

A Favorite Website:

Web Address: http://www.deviantart.com/
Site About: I think this website is very well put together. I think its really visually appealing. It's also a very successful website, they get a lot of viewers. This is one of my favorite sites because I'm an artist and it gives me a way to see all the new art that people are coming out with. Its really a great way to stay up with the ideas and concepts of evolving art. It has such a modern design that seems to appeal to young people.

"Site Analysis"
The site that I am choosing for my site analysis is http://www.manipulator.com/. This is the webisite of the artist Jill Greenburg. She does fashion photography and photo manipulation and such. She does a lot of celebrity portraits. I personally like the site but I think that it comes up short when considering the three elements you asked us to; orientation, navigation, and content quality.

The introduction to the site is just two large images (her photographs), which of course implies a photography website but it does not let the user know what he/she is getting into. At the very bottom of the page is the very small ENTER icon. I will admit that it took me a few seconds to figure out what to do, and a few seconds is too slow in the internet world.

Once you are into the site, the design is very simple. Now, this type of design is not unusual to artists websites since artists tend to stray away from the norm to create something unique. This sometimes costs them function and ease. Now the site has a strange navigation system. There are a few links at the top that are simple enough, but when you go through the portfolio it gets a bit confusing. I literally had to figure out how it worked. The idea is unique but not very user friendly. The site stays the same color through out and very little changes from page to page, and this does help the fluidity of the page. The content of this page is very little. The artist does not describe herself or give much information at all. Again, this probably isn’t the most user friendly.

As an artist however, I can defiantly relate to the reason why she would limit the information. She is letting the artwork speak, undisturbed for itself. If Art was meant to be explained, every piece would come with a two page summary. I would have liked to see her put in a little more information about herself though, like where she is, where she is from, her age, general things of that nature. I originally found the site while doing research and needless to say the site didn’t help much. Over all I think it is a more visually appealing site than it is functional.

Chapter 5

Chapter 5 is ALL about linking; Linking files, email links, point to file links, and anchors. Linking with Point to File allows you to easily link a page to a picture or text. You can also use it to replace placeholders with pictures on your page! When you create an email link you are linking the user’s email application to the address you specified. They use this a lot in “contact us” kinds of pages. Creating anchors allows the user to move around on a page with a lot of text more easily. They can go back to the top of the page or to different sections of the text by simply clicking text with an anchor. You can also link files such as PDF or zip files to your page so that users can easily download a file from your site.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4 basicly just got me a little more familiar with Dreamweaver by guiding me through excersises and creating a simple page. I created and saved new documents, set page titles, inserted images and text, aligned the images and text, created links and learned about meta tags and how to insert them. It is really important to know how to create your index.htm page since this is the page web servers recognize as the homepage and know to display that file first. Meta tags are important because they allow search engines to find your page and index it based on the key words or descriptions you use in your tags. You want these so people can actually find and look at your page!

Chapter 3

Dreamweaver requires you to have a Local Root Folder, or a main folder in which all your website’s files reside. An example of an absolute URL is http://www.millikin.edu/ (the exact location of a file on the web) and an example of a relative URLis index.htm (points to the page inside your website). A site root link is relative to the root of a site, and a document link is relative to a specific document.

These are the key things I got out of the chapter. The most helpful were the excersises because it helped me get a little more familiar with the program. I still have a long way to go though.

Chapter 2

In the second chapter I didn’t find the Windows sections very helpful simply because I do not use Windows for work or for personal uses. However, its good to have the reference in case I am using it for a client or employer. This chapter basicly outlines how to get started, how to get help/tutorials, and the six main elements of the Mac interface and how to use them (I focused on the Macintosh Interface). This is going to be very helpful once I get back on the computer and start with my web page because it is like a map of Dreamweaver. I’m sure I will have to turn back to this chapter more than once as I am getting started. It seemed to quickly go over the information and I feel a little overwhelmed but that’s the wonderful thing about books! You can go back as often as you please.
I’m really excited to start getting to know the program and I can’t wait until I am familiar enough with it to begin doing some more advanced designs!

Chapter 1

Even though we won’t be diving too deep into writing xhtml codes, it was really nice to see it explained in the first chapter of our HOT book. I agree that it’s helpful to have a basic knowledge of what it is, if not for just trouble shooting but also for conversation! I know that I always feel silly around designers who are talking about it and I have to just smile and nod and pretend I know what they are talking about. This first chapter seemed to give just a very basic description of several codes; most of which I have never heard of. It is nice to be able to say that you know what it is in today’s world where it seems everyone is computer literate. I am particularly interested in DHTML and Web applications because that is how you will create all the interesting things like the animation and rollovers etc. These are the things that I personally find to be fun on a website. I’m glad to know a little of the codes but it is a huge relief to know that Dreamweaver does it all for me. It still seems like another language completely and I know it would take me a long time to get comfortable using it and using it successfully.