Sprint 9
This week, I went in somewhat of a different direction than I originally intended. I was going to try to upload my site to the hosting service, and its server was actually working this week, but once I uploaded all of my files, it started showing me an error message that I researched how to fix, but couldn’t figure out. I will work on solving the hosting issue more either next week, or at some point before the showcase/project submission. I may have to use a new hosting service that actually costs money (so that it offers better support and less downtime) or just upload the site to my TCNJ server space for now and then after the semester when I have more time, try to make the site live at my purchased domain (www.necrourgica.com).
What I focused on this week instead was fixing up various details of the site in order to make it more visually appealing & responsive. I set my website’s width to not take up the whole browser on large screens and placed it onto a background, with a drop shadow and border around the body. This made it look 3D and much more professional. I also added shadows to various page elements such as text boxes, the text itself, and images. In addition, I added borders to various objects & I set up the menu structure so that when a menu item is clicked, the website smoothly scrolls to that section of the site. I changed the fonts to an ancient look for the headers, and to a more readable but still thematically appropriate font for the smaller text sections, and continued working on making the page elements as responsive as possible.
Something I learned this week about my project was how to take elements that have been created and function fine, and add various adjustments to them to enhance the visual appeal and make the design more professional. There are numerous ways to do this, such as adding drop shadows that use code which can be easily generated with online tools, text stroke, fancy looking borders, etc. I also learned more about web hosting, even though my web hosting attempt failed. Due to the error message I received on my server, I had to research more about why this error was occurring. This didn’t enable me to solve it, but offered me more information on this topic which may come in useful in the future.
Something I learned about my process was that if I have an idea for creating a certain element or feature, if I don’t know how to do it myself, I shouldn’t just toss it, because there are many, many online tools that enable you to easily select certain options and features that will automatically generate the correct code for you. For instance, I wanted to make my page more 3d by adding shadows, but didn’t know how to do this realistically, so I just googled “add shadow to body of page html” and found numerous tools that enabled me to adjust drop shadows, borders, text stroke, etc and gave me simple code that I could utilize. The overall message here is that “if you can think of it, it probably exists” so you shouldn’t throw away ideas just because you’re not entirely sure of how to implement them on your own.
Something I learned about the design process in general was that I shouldn’t get too overwhelmed or upset if the website/project isn’t looking how I envisioned it to, because as I mentioned above, there are many features and adjustments that can be made towards the end of the process which totally revamp how the website will look. The most important thing is to have all the content created and the general framework laid out, and the rest can be figured out later on. The various adjustments that can be made can transform the entire look & feel of the site. These last few weeks I was stressing a bit about the fact that the site wasn’t looking professional enough, but this week with just a small amount of research, I was able to enhance this and make the site much more more striking and thematically fitting to its subject.
