Inline CSS...FTW!

Doing the final project I learned the power of inline CSS. I was starting to get frustrated with some of the work that I was doing because I would set things in my main.css file to set things like having my list for my navigation bar display horizontally and then later on when adding another listed in the page, all of a sudden that decides that it wants to display inline too and I didn’t want it too. So it was nice to figure out the inline CSS stuff so I didn’t have to compromise an element of my page because it would cause another one not to work the way I wanted it to.

Weebly

Weebly was fairly simple to use. You can make a nice website relatively quickly once you figure out what you are doing. As usual my problem was mainly how I wanted things to look and where I wanted things to go so I ended up spending a lot of time looking at the different templates. I did a couple of the pages on my own but it took a long time for me make it look the presentable and useful. Once again those artistic muscles being work that have never been worked before. 

Eyes wide open

One thing that this class has done is it has made me look more closely at website than I ever have. I find myself viewing the page source of websites now to see how they did their code and how they made certain functions work on their page. I’ve peeked it to website codes on occasion before just screwing around but never really understood what I was looking at. From previous coding experience years and years ago, I could tell that they we’re maybe trying to get a particular block of code to do something but it was completely lost on me exactly what. Now I can look at a page (at least a predominately html one since my java experience is limited) and I can tell exactly what they were going for. I’ve said for years that I have no interest in any kind of coding but I think my opinion is starting to change.

left-brain vs. right-brain

The toughest part of this class for me has been that I am a very left-brained, analytical, technical person and I have had to flex some right-brain, artistic muscles that haven’t been used in ages. The coding part for me hasn’t necessarily been a problem. I’m not a programmer by any means but I do have a little bit of coding knowledge from younger days being a mechanical engineering student before working in the IT field. The most evident part of that was apparent when we were doing out family sites and while my code generally looked the way it needed to functionality wise, the page itself look like it had just survived an explosion at a paint factory. I eventually learned that that you can make a good looking page with just a couple colors rather that trying to use the entire palette.

function over fashion

I admire the artistic acumen that some of the people in this class and the 202 class have because I don’t have it. I’ve always believed in function over fashion. I believe can make a nice, clean page that is (hopefully) easy to read and functional. I ever did this professionally, I’d probably need someone to work on the artistic side. I can make it work but someone else will have to make it pretty.

Week 1 - Usability

Read the User Experience Basics on Usability.com this week. In was helpful in how it spelled out the core principles that a developer need to be aware of in making a functional, easy to use site or program interface that users are going to enjoy using and want to come back to.