Week 6 – Reflections

The web design class encompassed a lot of information in a few short weeks. I have learned how to make a web site in FrontPage as well as using the 2.0 Google website. I also learned a lot about colors and fonts and how to create pages that are visually appealing. Although everyone has their own personal choice on what they feel looks good.

I found FrontPage to be easier to use when I created the site from scratch. Trying to use one of the provided templates in FrontPage did not work well. I used totally different colors and font for each of the web sites. I discussed how I used Google in last week’s blog. Before starting my website in FrontPage I first searched for a button that I wanted to use for my website. Based on the button is how I came up with the colors for my website which ended up being green and black. I opened the button in Photoshop and used the brush tool to remove the picture that was there. I liked the button but did not want the picture. I used the text tool to add the needed text. I used Pristine 18pt – white and then used the move tool to place the text and save the button for web as a jpg.

I followed the storyboard (which I found very helpful) that I created and changed the font to be Book Antiqua – size 12 and Book Antiqua – size 10 for picture description. I changed the background color to ffff99 and used text color 33cc33. I decided at the last minute before burning a copy to CD to change the background color from yellow to white. I added a home.jpg in the top left corner and used font Pristine 48 for the header. Each of the headers are in font Book Antiqua size 18pt.

I then created a table of 5 to hold all of my buttons that will take you to each page. Of course, I learned the hard way that the table needed to be by itself and not part of another table. Being part of the same table cause the buttons to move as I switched pages. I then added additional tables as need to insert my pictures and descriptions. After creating the index (home) page, I copied and pasted that page to create a new page. I changed each page as needed. I needed to go into the HTML code to change some font colors that were not working for me so learning how to look at HTML coding was helpful.

My websites were totally different in the use of color and font. Once I got the hang of FrontPage I enjoyed using that software better then Google. Google was limited in fonts available and was not as easy to insert tables. If I were going to create and publish a web page, I would buy a product that allows more flexibility or upgrade one of the free 2.0 for full access. I am hoping that learning to create a website will help me at work, although my boss asked if I could learn Dreamweaver. Sounds like fun to me!