fresh start 9.16.2010

Sometimes it is best to let something “mature” or cool down before revisiting….

So here I am, back again after a year off to begin again. 

Today’s entry will not be long or filled with content.  Just needed to dust off the site and get some of the rust off my knuckles.  Right now I am looking for content that would be pertinent or interesting to a broader population base.  It is a lot more fun to write knowing that it will be read!   During that past year I have learned a lot about myself and “retirement”.   I like to be busy and so it is time to get back up and find something to do that involves interaction with other adults beyond my immediate family.  I spent too many years interacting with people to suddenly walk away.  We are not talking about a few people, but thousands!  That is a a tough act to follow, but right now  I would settle for something on a smaller scale to refresh my curiousity.     We are all curious to some degree, some more than others.  I happen to be one of those that is in the “very curious” category.  I love to listen to others, about their experiences, their life, anything.   Life and the many facets of it are interesting.

Try listening some time, you will be amazed at how interesting it is to listen.  Who knows, you might pick up a tip along the way that really means something to you.

More later,   like I said, just trying to dust off and loosen the rust!

Peter

week 13

I finally have a comp I like.  I am again having problems with my overlapping slices.

Finally had to rebuild the entire comp and save to a different file to get it to export.  That makes 5 generations of comp work I have done in Fireworks just to get it too the point where I could export cleanly.

Now I just have to figure out how to edit in Dreamweaver template so that I can build the pages (and site).  I have rough drafts on most of the content, but I still have to polish that too.

We’ll see next post how I have done.

Peter

week 12

Just a quick update keep the string of weeks going!

I am wrestling taking the fireworks comp over to a dreamweaver template.

So far I have learned how important it is to keep the layers uncomplicated and to make sure the slices are accurate and free of overlaps!  It took me about 10 tries before I finally got the comp slices clean enough to export correctly.  I am sure I am not done struggling with this issue.

More next week.

Peter

week 11

I have fallen behind on my updates for the post.  I should have some time later this week to catch up.

Stay tuned..!!

Some helpful links for using the Adobe tools to build a website.

http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/id=vid0152

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/css_page_layout_basics.html

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-lightroom-20/customize-a-template

P

week 10

Hello again…

Tough week.   Catching up with more to come.

Family time took priority!!

Look for some updates later on as I catch up on my posts.  Right now I am working on modifications to the final website and that is really taking a lot of time.

Stay tuned…!

P

Week 9

Week 9 was definitely “hump” week..!!!!

We had a lot to do, and it was important work that really required putting some thought into it.  Not to say the previous weeks have not been challenging, but week 9 was really IT!

I learned a lot about the steps for web page design that need to happen before ever touching the computer.  I thought I had my plan pretty well worked out until I started laying out the storyboard and flow chart..Now I have a lot of questions I need to make decisions on.  My plan was pretty generic, but after the past 8 weeks, I have definitely scaled up my plan. 
Laying out the comps just reinforced how many questions I still have to resolve.  Oh well…I like making decisons anyway. 

In the end, it will all come down to what is the most functional and user friendly. 

I don’t like my color pallete anymore and there are some design elements I would like to incorporate in the web page to make it different from the competition.   Hopefully I can get these worked out this week and revise at least the comps.  Critique tonight should help solve some of my issues.

Enough for now, I’ll be updating later on tonight an tomorrow.

P

week 8

What an interesting week!!!

Several interesting steps towards the website design. 

I am becoming very comfortable with the layout capabilities of Fireworks.  Working on the banners has really helped that progress, but I really liked the in class exercise that works with the layout capabilities available.  I already envision using these tools to help me with my final project layout once I finalize my story boards.  I probably will begin some basic formatting this upcoming week to get an idea of what I am facing in terms of  information needed.   I want to keep the final website as clean and user friendly as possible so there probably won’t be too many bells and whistles on the functional side.

Using Photoshop for the Global Giving Banner has really helped reaquaint me with the tools and capabilities of the program.  I found that it took a little while for me to remember how to create the animation.  I guess the old saying “use it or lose it” really applies.  It is nice to have tangible exercises that are meaningful as a means for continuing my education with the capabilities of the Photoshop.  I found that I kept removing details that made the banner hard to follow in my first version.  One element I did find I wanted to include more was the use of simple text in different font sizes to get the message across.  Good text, not too much of, and creative formatting of the text seem to be the most effective way to get the message out on the banner.

Project profiler/Phase one was really a lot tougher than I thought.  I had a lot of ideas on what I did and did not want to do, but they were just in my head on some scribbled notes.  Putting it into a formatted document really helps, but of course, I have already started to edit it for the next/final phase.  At some point I will  have to stop the editing and move on or I never will meet the deadline!  One thing I did discover is just how important it is to keep the layout simple but bright.   I really want the home page to “pop”.  During my discovery work I found that too many websites use a lot of text (paragraphs) on the opening page and I find this both dull and cumbersome as a user.  Who wants to read a long text when just searching anyway?  I know that I don’t.

Last project of the week started out as a big “ouch” when I opened it.  Of course, I was late getting to this one since I spent so much time organizing and drafting (several times!) my project profiler.  When I actually got into it, I did find the Case Study was not too bad and really helps me with my ideas for does and don’ts for my own web page.  Working with the group in the upcoming week will be great.  I am looking forward to the outcome  of our work for the presentation next week.   Probably out of our independent review to the website http://naw.lib.ms.us is that we all came to one overiding conclusion:  It lacks clarity!  Reorganizing the page using each of our ideas should help us with our own work.

Our reading assigments this week were really interesting, although I admit I have not completely digested the messages. ( that’s why I ended up printing them all!!).  I foresee returning to the articles many times as I get into the actual design/layout of my own site.  I am including the links below so that I can get to them quickly instead of shuffling paper when I get deeper into my own process.

A Dao of Web Design: John Allsopp…I like this one!

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dao

Joshua Porter/bakardo Blog:  I like his message on simplicity!!!

http://bakardo.com/archives/five-principles-to-design-by

Still digesting the CSS post by Chris Coyier on the difference between ID and class.

http://css-tricks.com/the-difference-between-id-and-class

Finally, the article on folds by Melissa Tarquini shot my whole original page design ideas a big dose of reality!!!  I saved this one for last because it really changed my perspective. I was operating (see some of my previous notes) under the premise that if a reader had to scroll the page was dead in the water.  After reading this article, I came away with a very new perspective on scrolling and content placement.  I still see the need for the importance of key content above the “fold” or screen view limit, but I am no longer worried about elemination and any content below that requires the reader to scroll down.  The bottom of the page has suddenly become important to me as an option, as long as I give some sort of “visual cue” that there is more below!

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/blasting-the-myth-of

That’s enough for this week…

P

week 7

This week was tough…!
Learned a lot about trial and error as I worked on Banner for Global Market banner. Switching between Fireworks and Photoshop to accomplish the animation was especially challenging. Photoshop makes animation easy, but I was not able to get all of thw quality I wanted from my Fireworks design. In the end I had to compromise and I am definitely not happy with the results. I will be spending more time learning how to make the animation work in Fireworks!!!
AACC fall banner came out better than I expected, at least I finally got the tiling on the large banner to work seamlessly, even if it is a little repetitive. It really helped with the small banner not to have to produce a tiling background.
More work this week looking for ideas for the final project. I really like a couple of attributes from several websites, just trying to decide which ones I can practically incorporate in my design.
Navigation buttons turned out to be a multiple trial project. I kept losing my over slices, but I think that is because I was not saving them correctly. After 3 tries, all of sudden I was ablet to get it to work, so in the end the goal was accomplished. Learned a lot about what not to do along the way!!

The articles on domain and web design were really helpful, I have read them twice. Time to start making some decisions on a domain name and to finalize my ideas for the layout and content on the final project website.

Some links to our reading:

http://searchenginewatch.com/2168021

I’ll be adding some more thoughts later on tonight.

P

week6

Starting this entry by saying that I have found some elements of this weeks classwork to be very challenging! Creating a banner design that works in both sizes might rank as the tougest.
Rollover buttons took me awhile to figure out, and I still do not have it entirely figured out, but two out of three did finally work. A lot of my struggles were with the interfacing of Photoshop and Dreamweaver, not unlike the problems I had with the Fireworks to DW intreface for the banner project.

Week 5 updates

Banner posting continues to be a challenge. I find the creative work fun, and I am getting pretty comfortable with using Fireworks. What is difficult is figuring out how to assemble the page and tiling background so that it tranfers correctly from Dreamweaver to the web. I know that there is one step I am missing and I am detemined to get this right. I have spent the majority of my time on the FTP side when I would have much rather spent more time working on the creative side….I intend to solve this problem tonight!!! I do like the ability to manage the background that Fireworks has. I believe that this will be useful when I begin my final site work. I have made some tiling backgrounds in previous html design work, Fireworks/Dreamweaver just make the process quicker (as soon as I figure out what I am doing wrong with my extened backgrounds!)
One thing I have noticed is how quickly multiple files can build up as I have worked on variations of the banner designs. File management is probably my weakest point and I believe that I will find my problem in this area. I should have set up a separate working file and then transfered my final comps to the banner file to clean up. I will work on that this week to weed out some of the dead files.
On to the Image work…Dreamweaver makes this extremely easy to handle. I have done this before with code and it is tedious to get the hotspots working correctly…Dreamweaver makes the process simple.
The link to Getty and having an account there could prove useful down the road when I cannot find any of my own photo work to use in a website.
Link to Getty:
http://www.gettyimages.com

 

I have really developed an appreciation for the ease with which Dreamweaver sets up CSS style sheets. I have tried multiple times to teach myself how to do this and understand the code, but I find that I keep reverting to basic html code and tags when I should be using CSS characters.

Links to some of the reading and review sites:
This is an example of a really bad site that Vincent Flanders has tagged. He is right!
http://www.vincentflanders.com/videos/gnn.html
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/videos.html
Looking at the different sites really does make one think about what not to do. I will probably use this link a lot when I get deeper into the design and construction of my own work. Just to make sure I don’t end up on his list!!!!

I’ll end here since I want to take another stab at getting the banners working correctly.

Back again.  Time to talk about my final project.

The reason I am taking this course is to be able to create a web presence for our family business.  Primarily a real estate sales endeavor, there are several other options I can offer from my own professional background in large construction project development.  I plan to emphasize my partners real estate sales expertise as the primary website development project.  My secondary goal (this may be in the future) is to develop my own expetise in capitol project development.  Right now that is secondary to the real estate sales site, this is the one that will have the most immediate impact on our business earning potential.  More to follow as I work through the process of developing the full plan for the site.

Time to sign off for today.
P