WEEK 5: Progress has accelerated

As I told you last week, progress of NarnianT-shirts.com has been accelerated due to me finding out what the specific CSS code of elements are thanks to a Google Chrome tool. And as I promised last week, a lot of progress has been made.

My main focus was getting the colors adjusted. Before, everything on the site was grey. It made the site look really boring and unprofessional (not sure how pro a joke website can be, but whatever). But, thanks to Google Chrome, I have changed the colors to make NarnianT-shirts.com look a bit more lively and easier to look at.

I made the title a gold color, added a background, changed the link design from blue and underlined to just grey, and made a couple minor changes.

Other changes? I added a new gag blog post, got rid of unnecessary links on the right sidebar, and now when you hover over one of the tabs, it makes them grey. Changes like that were made this week.

Narnian T-Shirts Week 4: I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT!!!

My main problem with NarnianT-Shirts.com the past couple of weeks has been finding the CSS codes for stuff like the header, menu, content, and background. It has hampered my ability to make quick progress with the site.

But that problem is resolved now! My teacher, MR. ERIK JONES, found a tool on Google chrome that can highlight the area you want to edit and tell you what the CSS code is for that element. Such a great tool. I feel as though progress with the site can move along much quicker now that searching for something won't take forever.

I have successfully changed the header font, the header color, and the entire menu... in 20 minutes. Think about what I can do if I have a whole week!

I also put in Edmund and Lucy profile pages, which adds to the content of the site. A new T-shirt design will be coming next week.

Full steam ahead!
To Continue...

WEEK 3: Trying to find things

OK, I have run into a problem.

I want to edit the header to make it say "Where we're irrelevantly relevant". Problem is, I can't seem to find the page that I go to edit the header is located. This idea of not finding things has been a theme throughout my time with Wordpress, and it's starting to wear on me a bit.

Blogger has the advantage over Wordpress when it comes to easiness.

That's really been the only problem. I put in two new pages talking about Peter and Susan and what kind of pictures my customers could put on their shirts. It's super fun just kind of joking around with the site, not really being serious when it comes to the information.

I have had to be careful when it comes to pictures. I can't use copyrighted photos, because then I have the potential to get in trouble with the owner of the picture.

I expect to add a LOT more onto the site in the coming week.

To Continue...

WEEK 2: Narnian T-shirts has made some progress

After encountering a few problems with the building tools on Wordpress, I feel as though the construction of NarnianT-shirts.com is coming along quite smoothly.

I managed to write a "Welcome" and a "Mission" page to the site. They were fun to write, mainly because the entire site is a big joke about Narnia.

I'm still trying to find out how to put a poll in. It's not as easy as Blogger mainly because it requires me to mess with a bunch of HTML stuff.

Other than that, nothing really exciting has happened. I'm slowly getting acquainted to Wordpress...

To Continue...

NarnianT-shirts.com: WEEK 1

Last week, for my final project, I decided to create a website called NarnianT-shirts.com.

The site is merely going to be about absolute ridiculousness. I mean, who makes Narnian T-shirts? No one!

I'm just getting acquainted with how Wordpress works (sorry Blogger, I ditched you) so the site at this point is unimpressive.
To Continue...

The Search Engine experience

I actually enjoyed learning about search engines because it's something we use every day. It's cool to see how it works and how Google/Yahoo/Bing/Whatever determines how your website is ranked. Scott Bothel came into our class explaining that websites generally rank websites by these factors:

• Back links
• Quality of work within the site
• Key words (at least they used to be relevant with search engines)
• A couple other smaller things

We then had to create our own sample webpage, which I did here.

HTML and CSS response

Whenever people see “internet language” (HTML), 90% of those people freak out and don’t have a clue of what any of it means. It’s all just a mix of numbers and letters.

I was one of those people. Until I learned how to design this webpage.

You may be asking how I managed to create a semi-decent webpage. I didn’t do it all on my own, as my teacher, Erik Jones, gave us a sample CSS file to work off of. From that, I dinked around with different codes and such and finally managed to have my page fit his smaller computer screen.

I actually enjoyed using Microsoft Expression Web to create my web page, at least once I got the hang of it. Once you memorize the overall format of the program and all of its codes, the process of creating a web page is a lot easier.

The student uploader – the thing where you apply your CSS file to your web page – was super easy, with only a few clicks necessary for it to work.

All n’ all, a good experience.

My Wikia experience

When you think of a Wiki, you think of worldwide known Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. But, there are other Wikis, and that's what I've and what all the other students in our class have been working on.

Our very own Wiki, titled BCS Web Design Spring 2011 Wiki.


Working with our wiki has been a great experience. Having the ability to create articles whenever you want and being able to add on to other articles is the main reason why it's so great. I have a profile within the website, but all my main information is on the list of students page.


All the links and information about the wiki are conveniently located  on the main page.


So to sum it up, our wiki has been a good experience so far. I haven't fully experienced it yet,  so at this point I can't give my full review... yet.

My "oh don't forget" experience

My overall process of creating the "oh don't forget" presentation went quite smoothly.

I first started out by searching "Cool Web applications." I then proceeded to scroll down the page and browse through all of the available web applications. I wanted something simple, but not overly boring or shallow.

Eventually, I came to select the "oh don't forget" application, an app you can learn about in my presentation in the blog post below. Me and Jackson Connell chose to use Google Docs in the making of our slideshow, mainly because in enables us to work in it at the same time.

The process of creating it through Google docs was easy, especially considering I had already done it before. With our App being simple, the slides required little hard work.

A lot of people struggled with putting the right Web address on their blog, but that was not a problem for me. I have done all this before, so it was fairly easy.

"Oh don't forget" presentation

Here's the Google docs presentation on the "oh don't forget" web application.

Aviary Song

This song will will blow your mind... SONG

Google docs Presentation - The Flying Cow

The Presentation 

I was not impressed with Google Docs. I did like the ability for more than one person could work on it at once, but other than that it was basically a step down from Microsoft Powerpoint. No copy and pastes of pictures, not a lot of creativity, and a couple other things. I would only use this if there was multiple people working on it.

What I learned this week 2/7 - 2/10

• The History of the Internet. I was suprised at the intial size of the internet, with it only having 4 computers to start with. The rate of new computers every year was shocking, bascily doubling every time. I never knew that TCP-IP came later in the internet, and that it really was used for idenifing computers. This portion of the class was suprisingly interesting to me.

• The process of creating a Website. Before this lesson, I thought creating a good website was only a few clicks away, and that you didn't have to know much to create one. Boy was I wrong. I discovered it takes a lot of knowledge and understanding to make one. What you do is type in a bunch of codes to tell the computer to make a picture or something, and it does it. Seems like a really hard thing to do, and I have a newfound repect for people who create one.

• Client Side and Server Side. Now THIS is what's useful. Before I thought that every problem on the Internet had to do with the computer, and that there was a virus in it or something. But now I realize that some problems relating to the internet are related to the server. Let's say I'm visiting a website amd click on a link. If the website crashes or something, I can't blame my computer for that, I rather should blame the server my computer is communicating with.

Internet history response

Before the internet came around, important files were kept on single peices of paper in select places. That was a problem because if those peices of paper got burned, the files would be lost.

Enter the Internet.

The internet essentially linked multiple computer together so they could share information. So if one computer had a bomb drop on it (this was the Cold War times) and lost it's information, the other computers would have that same information. This was the purpose of the internet... not for long.

Eventually a couple of univercitys started using this "Internet", mainly to share information. But unfortunutally for the common American, the internet wasn't avadible until the mid 80's, which is when the internet and computers in general started taking off. The number of people on the internet increased exponentially, swelling to 1,136,000 by 1992.

During the 1980's, a man invented HTML, which allowed computers to locate webpages more easily. Computers were evolving fast, mainly to keep up with the expansion of the Internet.

Syllabus response

Subjects I'm interested in this semester

• Facebook and how it works
• All the different types of blogs.
• How Wikis work and what goes into them.
• Oddly, I'm interested in the copyright law reffering to using someone else's pictures on the internet.

Subjects I'm not really interested in

• Languages of the internet, sounds like a lot of uniteresting numbers and what not.
• Web Servers

All the rest of the subjects I really don't know what to expect, mainly because of my lack of knowledge in those areas.

Welcome

So, uh, welcome to my blog. There's nothing flashy about it, which not really a concern. If you haven't picked it up by now, the main goal of this blog is a place to submit assignments for my school's Web Page Design class.

I'll post something once and a while not relating to school, but doing that would defeat the purpose of Facebook and Twitter. Plus, you probably don't want to know about what's going on in a High School freshman's life anyway.