Real World Applications

So, as it turns out, I am using the skills I learned in CLIO 2 again!  I have just been tasked with creating a new website from an older, outdated one.  The cool thing about this one is I am getting experience working with a ”client” of sorts who has some specific needs and goals for the site.  It’s fun to go through the process of coming up with a mock-up, and then talking over what else needs to be added, or what they would like to see changed.  I have found that I still remember pretty much everything I learned, but I did have to refer to the coding on my site for a few problem-solvers at first.  A refresher of sorts.  Also, I am playing around with using Adobe Fireworks to create the banners for some of the pages.  It seems fairly easy to use at the moment, but I will admit that I am not doing any hardcore work with it yet.

On a side note, I discovered that if you google my name, my website comes up on the first page!  Of course, it links to the Atomic Age page, which is not currently part of my site.  Also, if you google nuclear testing or atomic age, I can’t even find mine, but hey, it’s a start!

Final Feedback

Alright, I don’t know who is still checking these, but I would like to ask for any feedback you have on my final project.  I will probably keep my website and transfer it to its own domain, but I would like to know if there is anything anyone would like me to fix before it really goes public.  Thanks!

*Sighs*

And it’s done.  My final project has been turned in along with my evaluation.  I really enjoyed this class, and I will continue to use the skills I learned to create more websites!  I will probably keep this blog up for a while as well, so feel free to keep it on your blog roll if you’d like.  It was a pleasure having everyone in class.  Thank you so much for your feedback, and for you help!  We did it!  Have a great summer!

Oh, Prof. P. has already started putting the links to the final projects up, and they look great!  We’ve come such a long was from our first CSS assignments! 

No Sleep for the Clio 2 Student

My oh my.  Good news: I just finished making changes to my Atomic Age page to the point where I am at least somewhat satisfied with it.  Bad news: it took me way too long to do.  If all the rest of my pages take equally as long to perfect, I will either not be sleeping for the next three days, or it won’t be finished by Thursday.  More likely the former than the latter.  Anyway, here is the link to the atomic age page.  Feel free to look at it and give me feedback, especially if you have access to IE6, as I do not.  I’ll post links to the other pages as I finish them.

The Revelations of Myst

I was not a fan of this game.  First of all, I too had difficulty finding it anywhere.  I was finally able to download a demo of the game, but when I went to play it, Myst IV told me that my graphics card was unrecognizable by the game.  I even tried a demo from a different website in case it was just that particular file.  So instead, I had to download the Myst V demo from the creator’s website.  That worked, and I was able to test out the demo.  Like Elara, I had discovered that I am not a fan of 3D games where you run around a solve puzzles.  It’s not so much the solving puzzles I don’t like (I love the game Azada which is nothing but puzzles), it’s the having to run around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to press every button and explore every object I come across in order to find the puzzles!  Not to mention I have slight motion sickness, so playing a 3D game like this for too long gives me a headache and makes me nauseous.  I also think that part of my discontent might lie in the fact that I was playing Myst V instead of Myst IV which seemed like it might have been more interesting to me.

I agree that video games certainly have something to teach us.  Like I said, I love Azada, which promotes critical thinking and logical reasoning.  I think if someone were to create a game of a similar nature using a history topic, it would be just as interesting.  Part of what I didn’t like about Myst V was the same thing that everyone was complaining about with The Lost Museum before.  There was a lot of running around clicking on things without any results or instructions.  There was a game that I played a couple of months ago (I wish I could remember the name…) that was the perfect format for what I think a history game should try to emulate.  Basically, it combined logic puzzles with sort of a search and find atmosphere where you had a list of clues to find in a particular location, and then you had to use those clues to solve the various puzzles in order to move on.  You could create a history game in a similar fashion.  For example, you could have a game on the Revolutionary War where someone had to find all the parts to their musket and then put it together before running off to join the militia.  That way, the game is fun and engaging, but still historical.

I think it is going to take a set of history-loving programmers to create something that will be good enough to bring a new name to history games.

Design Assignment

So my design assignment is finally posted after several hours of fiddiling around with the picture at the top to get it just right.  And then of course there was the task of choosing an appropriate font for the subject.  I know that the color scheme may seem a little bland and boring, but it’s how I view the time period and the particular events I am discussing.  However, if anyone has any opinions on what would be some good colors to incorporate, I would be up for testing it out.

On a similar note, before starting my design assigment this past weekend, I went through and did some housecleaning on my site, i.e. fixing links and adding a link to the about page to all of the subpages of the site.  Also, something I have been contemplating, and have discussed with Dr. Petrik, is how to do the overall design of my site.  She said that all the pages need to form one cohesive group, and the layout and design need to be pretty similar on all pages.  My dilemma is that I want to use the map as the background like I did for my reprecussions page, but that particular image does not fit with each page.  So the question is, should I stick with the original design that is on the science page, should I keep the background and design of the reprecussions page for the whole site, or should I keep the same concept as the reprecussions page but change the background image on the pages where it is necessary?  Let me know what you think!

Technology and Visual Appeal

When watching the podcast of Hans Rosling’s talk at the TED Conference, I could not help being hooked.  Not only did the information he presented help to eliminate some of the myths about longevity in third-world countries, but the software he used for his presentation was amazing!  I was a biology major in a former life, and as I was watching his presentation, it made me think how much more impressive my senior thesis could have been if I had a program like that with which to show off my statistics.  That got me thinking about how I could use a similar concept to for my website.

While there are a few charts and statistics I could present on the amount of radiation poisoning for a particular group, I was thinking more about the overall look of my site.  What was it that got my attention about his presentation?  Was it just the moving charts, or was it the colors and the visual appeal of his overall presenation?  I decided it was a combination of both.  His charts were interesting with their moving statistics and what not, but the part I could apply to my site was the overall concept of putting information in a format that the audience can understand and relate to.  The graphs looked good because they were easy to understand, while incorporating a sort of multi-media.  For my website, I need to make sure that the language is scholarly, but still understandable, and try to supplement some of the text with video or audio files that relay the same message.  Watching this podcast gave me many ideas for how to capture my audience’s attention without using fancy programs. 

Putting Accessibility to the Test

Wow.  I can honestly say that after doing the WebAIM screen reader simulation, I completely understand why Prof. P. wanted us to have a short navigation bar with clear subject links.  The homepage of the “U of A” website alone had 21 navigation links with at least two graphics.  By the time I was getting ready to listen to the menu for the third time in order to figure out which link I needed to follow to get the necessary information, I was already tired of hearing it.  I can’t image what it must be like to try and navigate a site like that every day!

After following this simulation, one of the things I would have liked Joe Clark to go into a little more depth on (and maybe he does in further chapters of his book now that I think back to the chapters he referenced) is how tedious screen readers are, and how concise web designers need to be when creating things like their navigation bars.  It’s one thing to listen to text being read, but it’s something completely different to listen to a huge list of navigation options multiple times in order to navigate to multiple pages.  I found his discussion on the different terms a little repetitive, and almost a little sarcastically demeaning.  He seemed to present some good problems, but not very many helpful solutions.  Again, the reasoning for all this could very well be that he resolves the issues in the remaining chapters in his book, but we’ll see.

Photoshop, Oh Photoshop

So I started out this week by playing around with putting my own image in the background of a page, playing with the lasso tool, and such like we did in class.  I came up with a product that I kind of like, and was planning to make the new background for my typography page.  However, a recent poll of friends and family has come to the conclusion that it’s nice, but it doesn’t really best display my information.  You can see the revised page here if you like, and feel free to way in on the debate of course. The page the most seem to like is here so that you can do a proper comparison.

As far as the readings for this week go, I thought they gave some interesting techniques and tips for using Photoshop.  I particularly liked the site on creating gradient backgrounds, although that had more to do with proper mark-up than Photoshop.  Also, I found Karen Eismann’s restoration and retouching techniqures in Photoshop to be incredibly helpful, but a bit overwhelming.  Like Sherpa John said, I’m glad that Spring Break is coming up so I will have more time to play around with Photoshop and discover its various functions and techniques.

Finally!

After many tedious hours of playing with my endnotes, they all work.  I also included my pull quote and two block quotations.  The two block quotes look slightly different because one is a picture I created in photoshop using my text of choice, and the other is one that uses proper XHTML and CSS mark-up for block quotes, since I figured part of the point of this assignment was to show we are capable of creating block quotations. I included my requisite picture as well, and after some fiddling, was able to classify it in a way that allowed it to be placed on the opposite side of the column from my pull quote.  Thank you Jerry for the tip on using mandarindesign.com for the CSS coding on the pull quote, by the way.  Other than that, I can honestly say that I am finished with my type assignment. *breathes a sigh of relief*