Sprint 4
This week, the first thing I did was finalize my Home page. Last week, I had already created the basic structure for this page, but I needed to figure out what type of hover effect to use for the large buttons/icons that will link to the Shop, Music, and Events pages. This took a lot of experimenting. I figured out a way to create a div that uses the appropriate icon as its background image and displays an overlay with text when hovered upon. These looked great, but no matter how much I tried, I could not figure out a way to make the buttons responsive when using this method. Instead, I decided to insert the buttons as responsive images which simply grow when hovered upon. I think this serves my purposes well enough.
Next, I set up the overall skeleton of my Bio page. I obtained a bio from one band member, as well as both of their pictures, and set up panels on the page, one panel for each member. The panels each contain the picture of the member, the member’s name, and the member’s bio (I still need to get a second bio, so for now I just used the same bio for both members). This overall design looks great on certain sized devices but is not fully responsive. When viewed on a small device like an iPhone, the pictures shrink to ridiculously small sizes and mess up the formatting of the page. I will work on fixing this next week.
The lessons I learned this week had to do with creating hover overlays. I figured out how to do this with divs, as I mentioned, but I could not figure out how to make these divs responsive. The concept of making the hover overlays was still a useful one to learn though. I also discovered several websites that help you design with a Bootstrap template. They provide code for creating responsive rows/columns, panels, and other useful features. I utilized the responsive rows/columns on my Bio page and will probably use them further throughout my site. Something I learned about the process of designing is, again, that things that seem like they will be very easy sometimes end up taking much more time than you would expect.
As far as how things are going overall with my project, I would say I am fairly on track. Usually I don’t get every single thing done that I have planned on my Sprint for that week, but I compensate by finishing those things the following week, and during Spring break I will be able to put a good amount more work in which will help with the overall progress of the website. In general, I am definitely moving along pretty well with this project.
