Unit 44 Website Design

relevant web technologies 

What is html5?

Html5 is the latest and last version of mark up language for structure and content in the World Wide Web.

Its goals include providing compatible language support for the latest multimedia whilst still being readable by humans and computers alike.

Its also been built with newest technology in mind, e.g. low powered smartphones to give the largest functionality of its kind when compared with latter versions (html 4, xhtml1)

In addition html5 utilises many new syntax features including <video>, <audio> and <canvas> elements designed to make it easy to handle multimedia and graphical content on the web

Css

Css or cascading style sheets are the visual companion to web design, it makes up what a website will look like or sets the layout when paired with the html code to make it visually engaging.

Css allows for the original mark up of the page to be altered and changed accordingly, making a web pages visual style more versatile even if it isn’t the original css from the owner of the page.

evaluation of other sites

web design issues

Poetry slam. Org

Aesthetically the poetry slam site is bland and uninteresting; only three colours are used throughout, dark purple, light purple and white. Normally this wouldn’t be a bad thing, too many colours can clutter the senses and make it hard for anybody make sense of the information but there has to be a solid use of css behind it to draw the user in and want to know more about this site.

Access speed is very good but this may be due to the basic interactivity, its plain.

Content contained within the website as a whole it very good its to the point and explains what each section is all about, unfortunately its very bland information.

The home page’s content however isn’t very good, all we see on entrance to the site is a very short poem then a short sentence explaining what poetry slamming does and is. It’s very confusing though as these all look to be in one paragraph, it’s hard to separate what the poem ends and where the information begins.

Also your not told what this site is really for, when I first found it I thought it was just and archive for poetry but on further reading and navigation of the site I found its for booking of poetry workshops.

In terms of responsiveness this site is very good, it reacts to resizing of the page and doesn’t break when doing so.

                                                                    web design.

this is pre design thumbnail drawings, i worked out a basic page layout that all of my pages would follow, i just needed to tweak each one to fit its individual purpose.

this was a larger polished version of my home page layout, i tried to keep it simple enough for user navigation but still have it so i could incorporate as much information possible. this was a hard task as too much writing would not keep a viewer of this site interested for long but also not enough wouldn't draw in the user and make them want to know more. as a designer this task wasn't to bad but from someone who is completely new to coding a website i didn't factor in the technical difficulty.

paper prototype

a design tool used in most industries, paper prototyping is a way of placing and plotting how things should be structured and work before you begin coding and interactively making the project at hand.

this helped me refocus and understand that i may be able to visually design a site but making a working thing would be much harder.

as coding goes this is probably very basic, i found my self focussing to much on the CSS and not enough of my time on the pat that makes the site "tick".

i managed to make the site technically interactive by giving it links to social media sites for my "social hub" in the bottom left corner. the tabs just under the header when clicked would also take you away form the home page but did not have a site to go to yet.

Evaluation of Homepage-

in the creation of my homepage i found that it's not as easy as it looks. the first 2 weeks of design were particularly hard as the concept of writing the HTML5 and the CSS to work in tandem was alluding me.
once i progressed in the code academy tutorials i managed to understand it better, although right now i understand HTML better then the CSS which is why design wise its pretty poor. I've kept with the original template given by the tutor but i've more or less focused on trying to incorporate user interactivity rather than aesthetics, this is shown right now with the social media hub at the bottom left hand corner of the footer.
the most i've done so far with design is changed the colour of the header and footer, added in a logo for the head and foot and also changed the font of the title at the top of the page.
another aspect of inline design would be the layout of the social media hub, getting them to be ordered in the "4-square"layout was a great accomplishment for me, i've probably done it in the most awkward way of placing it in a table and hiding the boarder of the table.

the feedback for my homepage was more or less expected, it needs more in its design, it doesn't catch my eye and the logo seems to be a little "splashy".