Constandina Tutten's Weblog

In this, my final blog post for this course, I want to say how much I’ve learned this semester.  I noted during our blended session on 12/2 that this is the hardest course I have ever taken, and that was the truth.  But it has enabled me to achieve a certain level of comfort with technology that I never thought I’d have to familiarize myself with, and which will certainly be an asset to me upon completion of my degree; for that I am grateful.  I want to thank Dr. Simon as well as my fellow students for how helpful everyone has been.

In this, our last lesson, we consulted smartwebby.com to go over the web design guide and any tutorials we found helpful.  I liked the “making your site live” and “css styles” tutorials in the Dreamweaver section.  The site contains just a vast amount of information.  I’m sure I will be consulting it again as we come into the home stretch for this course.

This has been the most challenging course I have ever taken.  I have been pretty much obsessing over the web site project, but honestly this blog has been the hardest part of the course for me. It does not come naturally to me to journal, keep a diary, or do anything else that is similiar to blogging.  As a matter of fact, I intensely dislike it.  So it has definitely been a challenge to me to keep motivated with the blog, even though following the lessons every week has been no problem.

This week we were given “fun” sites to view:

Kopozky.net: Hilarious.  I think I read the strips back as far as mid-2007.  I love “the admin.”

OK-cancel.com: An archive of both articles, and a comin strip written by two human-computer interaction (HCI) specialists.  The comics were pretty funny, especially one in the archives about a fictional social networking service called “twatter.”

Bugbash.net: Definitely my favorite of the three.  I was practically laughing out loud at the comics.

From the list of the “27 best places you should visit to get incredible web design inspiration,” I visited the following:

The FWA: favorite web site awards.  There were some A-mazing sites showcased here.  Evidently you can submit your own site for consideration.  There is a pblic shortlist available to view, which is comprised of sites any registered user can vote on.  Then there is the site of the day, which is decided on by the FWA panel.  The current site of the year, we choose the moon.com, is completely amazing.  I love anything having to do with astronomy.

CSS Dance: much like the FWA, this site has a dark background and a double column of the current sites submitted for their impressive designs.  Under each site are values for comments, delicious, tweets, and rating.  There is very little information on this web site other than the submitted sites.  There was a link for their blog.  But, for example, I could not find any information about what goes into the rating value assigned ti each site.

CSS Design Yorkshire: Boy, oh boy do I love the Brits, and I also loved this site showcasing good web design, with it’s hip gray and orange layout.  One thing I really liked about this site is that it had entries going back into 2006.  It was pretty neat to go through the years and see which components of web design obviously have a more timeless appeal, as they keep showing up year after year.

Oriental Web Design Inspiration: Once again a  gray background, which works really well for displaying shots of the showcased web sites.  I actually chose this site because I am NOT a fan of this kind of design.  I’ve never seen into the whole anime thing, which is what I think of when I think of “oriental” design.  That being said, I liked the visual appeal of this site but could not get past the various spelling and grammatical errors I found.  It detracts so much from what would have otherwise been a pretty cool site.  I did like the articles that were available on web design.

Unique CSS: Very clean, modern looking site.  Gray background again!  It must be an accepted fact in the design world that it’s a good color to display screen shots on, because I’ve seen it used a LOT.  On this site, designs are submitted every month, four are voted on to be displayed, then a winner each month is chosen from the four and awarded a cash prize.  I particularly liked September’s winner, julie-hemery.com, and July’s winner, tossed.com.

Flashvista: This web site was super easy to navigate and had tons of flash resources.  I checked out some great sites that were on their top lists, and went through a couple of the tutorials that were offered.  There were a lot but the two I did were on 3-d rotation and loading photos dynamically.  The tutorials were really easy to follow.

Flash Tutorials: This was a tutorial for building a floating menu.  I personally did not like the look of this menu, but I guess that’s neither here nor there.  The tutorial was really lenghty and detailed but it was really easy to follow.

SitePal-Flash Avatars: I can’t express how many times I’ve debated using an avatar on my web site.  I am at the same time both fascinated and slightly creeped out by them.  But I have thought several times that, particularly since I’m doing a site for a small family business, it would be nice to make it more personal.  I thought one of myself or one of the other members of my family with some kind of welcome message might be nice.

Adobe Flash: So of course, like all things Adobe, the pages on their site about flash are stylish and easy to navigate.  Go figure, right?  If I have not already mentioned this before about the Adobe products, I like how the site tells you which features will be most useful to you depending on what yo’re using the software for.  If you’re a professional web developer and want to incorporate interactivity into your sites, I guess Flash would be the thing to use, although at $699 I think it’s the most expensive offering from Adobe that I’ve seen so far.  I don’t think Dreamweaver and Photoshop are that pricey, are they?

Swift: According to their logo, Swift is “modeling and animation software.”  Something about this site really appeals to me.  The use of the light, kind of smoky blue on the site the look of the site in general give it a sort of otherworldly look.  It makes me think of extraterrestrials.  Anyway, I got so into this site that I spent almost as much time giving myself a refresher course on boolean mathematics and a crash course on what “extrusion” and “lathe” meant just so I could figure out what the new features of the software were.  I have a friend that used to work in modeling and simulation for the military, and I wonder if she’d ever heard of this software.

Swish: Flash animation software.  This company is headquartered in Australia and it seems to be the least expensive of this type of software.  There are also a substantial blog and tutorials available.  The site does not have the visual appeal of Swift’s site.  It’s pretty much a lot of gray and white.  But it is uncluttered and easy to navigate.

HotScripts: This appears to be primarily a resource for serious programmers and upper-level IT managers.  It basically has links, information, and tutorials on every type of programming language and script imaginable.  I had to laugh at the fact that one of the most popular scripts right now is called “big dump.”  One thing I did not like about this site were the rules for posting in their forum.  The list of these rules was lenghty and really detailed and I think flies in the face of the type of open discussion one would think would be encouraged.  I get that the conributors are mostly professionals and that a standard of quality would need to be maintained, but c’mon.  Just enforce a few commonsense rules and enough with the micromanagement.  I’d be terrified to post anything lest I capitalize something by accident and get my account deleted.

MP3S: Appears to be a bad link.  http://www.soundstageav.com/mastersonaudio/200502 was not found.  I tried just googling “soundstageav” and evidently the site was closed down at the end of 2009.  I wasdirected to soundstagenetwork.com instead.  There was a lot of information about audio/visual equipment, buying guides, etc.  However, I did not really find any information about MP3s.

How to create .M3U files and streaming audio: After reading this, I don’t know why anyone would choose not to stream audio on their site if they’re going to use audio.  I can’t believe how easy it is to set up an audio file to stream.

Audacity: free audio editing software, and tutorials available.  There is a pretty good FAQ section.  You can do a bunch of stuff with this software, including transferring audio off of tapes and records and making ringtones.  My in-laws were musicians back in the 70′s and it’s pretty neat to think that I could take one of their old recordings and make it into a ringtone.

Musicovery internet radio: I’ve never been on this site, but this is pretty neat and I can see where it could get pretty addictive.  You are simply prompted to enter an artist or title.  I entered “Modest Mouse” (for whatever reason, one of the first bands that came to mind and hit enter and voila!  Music just started playing!  Prior to this lesson, the only internet radio I’d ever heard of was Pandora.

Pandora internet radio: When I say that the only other internet radio I’d ever heard of was Pandora, I literally meant I’d pretty much only heard of it.  I once let someone use my laptop and was wondering what they were listening to and I saw that they had Pandora minimized at the bottom.  And in the past if I got a hankering to listen to a particular song while I was working, I’d usually pull it up on youtube.  Not ever again after I’ve visited this site!  It appears the idea is that you enter a song or artist and only music that is similiar gets kicked out.  I, with my love for music that reminds me of my early college days, entered in “Plowed” by Sponge and I immediately got Sponge, followed by Smashing Pumpkins, followed by Bush.  An AWESOME mix of mid-90′s alternative.  I am in love with this website.  The people that created it are geniuses.

Wiki Public Domain Image Resources: This was a great site, although I could have frittered away an entire day going to all the links for various public domain images.  One link I liked in particular was for “America as it was,” a collection of vintage postcards.  I love all the early Americana type of stuff.

LibrarySpot.com Image Resources: Definitely not as useful a site as the one above.  You can search by theme, collection, etc. but I liked that the wiki site, unlike this one, was very specific with their headings and noted which links led to web sites with only public domain inages.  I think that for the sake of efficiency, libraryspot is not as user-friendly.

Read Write Web: This site confused me a little, in that I don’t see how it is a resource for images.  It is self-described as being a technology blog and I read though quite a few of the postings, reads the backgrounds for the contributing staff, and went through several of the pages.  It certainly has a very clean, bold look with the use of red, white, and black and the blog postings seemed to be about pretty cutting-edge topics. But I still have to admit that I did not quite understand why it was relevant to this week’s lesson.

Footnote.com: I probably could have spent hours going through this site.  It is a giant repository for archived documents and you can browse by topic, time period, keyword, name, etc.  It is very easy to navigate through.  You do have to sign up as a member to have free range of the site and there is a fee associated, although there is a free membership with less access available.  To someone whose dream job is to work in the National Archives, this is a really neat site.

Adobe Photoshop: I’ve never used Photoshop myself but I saw a really interesting video on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcFlxSlOKNI) that gives n idea of what is possible with this program.  The adobe site has plenty of help in the way of tutorials, etc.  This is not software I would have any business owning, however.  I’d be photoshopping practically every single photo of me in existence.

Adobe Fireworks: This program confuses me a little, even though I read the information on the web site and the FAQ section pretty thoroughly.  If I understand it correctly, fireworks is a graphics program that lets you design/optimize graphics, which you would then turn around and import into dreamweaver for use in a web site.  There was a real emphasis on the fact that fireworks makes this a streamlined process regardless of what kind of device (computer, smart phone, etc.) you’re designing for.  I guess I would never use this unless I were a professional web designer and wanted to create my own graphics.

Gimp: I recall looking a this website earlier in the semester, but I didn’t realize until going over it again how much you can actually do with your images using this.  And it’s FREE!  Ok, so maybe I can touch up some of my less-than-perfect photos without shelling out $600 for Photoshop.

GimpShop: Still a free version of the gimp software, but this one is made to look and work like photoshop; evidently you can actually learn to use it by doing photoshop tutorials.  The most interesting piece of information I got from this site was a Harvard study that was noted and apparently came to the conclusion that open source software should in theory be of better quality that proprietary software since more people are able to contribute to and refine it.  Cool.

Since we covered chapter 17 earlier in the semester, we have now come to our last chapter in Creating a Web Site.  Chapter 16 showed us how to incorporate audio and video into our web designs.  Now I’ll just say that I am slightly obsessed with YouTube and even though I would never be brave enough to post one of my own creations on it, it was pretty interesting to learn how to do it if I wanted.  I have been turning over in my head for some time how I could use multimedia in my web site and I think the only thing that really lends itself would be background music.  My family is of Danish descent and we did make many European style items in the bakery, so I was thinking some kind of traditional Danish folk music might work.  My uncle and cousin had years ago made a commercial to advertise the bakery and  think it would have been awesome if I could have somehow provided a link to the commercial on my site but since I 1., don’t know where the video is at this point and 2., remember it being made more for fun than to actually draw business, I think that would not be practical.

Chapter 15 in Creating a Web Site walked us through creating “fancy buttons and menus.” Me oh my, this Java Script stuff is a trifle confusing still for me.  I like the idea of using graphical buttons in my web site.  Again, since I plan to do it on my family’s bakery, I can think of lots of ways to incorporate them.  But the part of this chapter that was the most useful to me was the information on creating collapsible menus.  I just really love the look of these.

Ilovetypography.com, and their article “15 excellent examples of web typography”: the site itself is an exhaustive collection of everything typography.  I seriously was amazed at the amout of links running down the right column to articles dealing with everything from designing a font from scratch to what Freud would think the types of fonts we use say about us.  In the “15 examples” list, there was a particularly cool site noted called “Quipsologies” that had a really neat logo and a brown and orange theme; it looks like something I’d peruse in a coffee shop.

Typographica.org: I really loved the look of this site.  It has a really old school, newspaper type of feel.  I think even if I hated the site in general I would still be impressed because it’s the only site I’ve seen this far that includes a colophon at the bottom of the page.  “Colophon” is a term I have not heard since my high school yearbook days.  The whole “journalistic” (the only word I can think to use) look was awesome.

Microsoft typography: I expected this site to be more functional than beautiful, which ended up being the case.  But there were good resources for choosing and using different fonts and a decent FAQ section.  I always appreciate an FAQ section on a web site.

ABC typography: this site was initially appealing to me with it being a “museum” of typography, but I got really frustrated at clicking on broken link after broken link.  So I didn’t get to see the information on very many types of fonts.  On the ones I did see, I liked the simplicity of a description of the font, an example of it, and the “id card” showing where it was created, by who and when, and any links.

A list apart: Too often I’ve found myself getting overwhelmed with really technical sites, since I don’t consider myself a really technical person.  This site seems to strike the rare balance of technical and user friendly.  It has links to several articles that I can totally see going back to reread as I fine tune my own web site.

TypoGraphic: This was a really neat site.  I loved the page showing the evolution or letterform from Egyptian to Hebrew to Phoenician to Greek to Roman.  I generally like timelines but the one on this site I found a little confusing because there were a few entries for people’s dates of birth and death with no further information listed about them.  I assume they were listed at all because they contributed something relevant to typography, but it seems kind of random to list them and not note why they’re included on the timeline.  I loved a font called “pilot” in the site’s typeface gallery.

Digital Magazine: This was a really great site dealing with how to incorporate good typography choices into CSS.  I particularly appreciated one section that noted that most readers “scan” rather than read word for word, and that attention really  needs to be paid to elements like headings and bulleted lists.

Noupe.com: “Using CSS to fix anything” Great article with easy to follow directions to remedy various glitches.  I get the impression that using internet explorer results in a lot more problems than using Firefox.

Designsnips: Profiles well-designed web sites and rates them in different areas such as tabbing, textures, and navigation.  I always appreciate examples of how to do things the right way, so this may be another site I consult again while I’m finishing up my project.

We have now reached the final chapter in The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, which discusses the use of imagery in web sites.  I think the issue of what kinds of images I would want to use on my site drove my decision on what to do my site on more than any other factor.  I had considered, for example, doing a site on my husband’s old army unit.  But then I considered how much trouble it would be to find unit-specific images, how much I did not want to use stock images of just any unit, and how much I did not necessarily want to drive to NC just to take my own photos.  My decision to do a site on my family’s bakery was largely influenced by the fact that there are a wealth of photos in my family that I would be able to use that depict the bakery at all stages of its existence, as well as a lot of the things we’ve made, wedding cakes we’ve done, etc.  I liked that this chapter discussed topics such as copyright, which I’ve given a lot of thought to, but also discussed a lot of style issues, such as photo orientation, cropping, etc.  It reminded me of my days on the high school yearbook staff (where I was co-editor in chief my senior year incidentally).  Also, I learned in this chapter that I had the acronym “PNG” incorrect.  I thought it stood for “permanent network graphic” when it actually stands for “portable network graphic.”  This chapter also talked pretty extensively about the effects that are possible with Adobe Photoshop.  I have to say that even with my limited technical/artistic knowledge, I still think Photoshop is about the coolest thing ever.