Fall 2010: Midterm Critique

Index of pages I've worked on so far.

Fall 2010: Update 7

I've been looking lately at the css zen garden website. So, this week I've been doing a lot of studying the code (html and css) written by the site's contributors. It fascinates me that so many different designers can use the same html and css tags to make such different designs for a page. The css and html is right there on the site to download because they want people to submit their css designs. I've been thinking that I could, perhaps, do something like the css zen garden for my portfolio website. I could design a few different css files and put links on the site. I don't know if that will be feasible or not, but it is something to think about. This next week will be a lot of reading. I got the book that goes with the website, and it looks like it will be really useful.

Fall 2010: Update 6

It's taken me half the week, but I think I've finally figured out why I can't get my email forms to work properly. After a good bit of Internet research, I found out that the files have to be uploaded to the Internet for them to work, not just opened in the browser. That was an easy enough problem to solve; I uploaded the files to my I-drive. And they still didn't work. Back to researching. I have the final answer. The server has to be set up to handle php, which is what I was using to handle the email part of the form. I know what the problem is, but I have no way to fix it (at least not that I know of yet, and providing this is the right answer to the problem).
While I wasn't obsessing over getting contact forms to work, I made a good bit of progress on dropdown menus. Last week I built one using only html and css that worked on only a select few browsers (none of the popular ones). This week, I found some great tutorials that show how to build two different types of dropdown menus. One is what I would call a collapsible menu. If the user clicks on a heading, the heading opens to show everything that was under it. Clicking again closes the heading. The other type of dropdown menu I found was what I was originally thinking of. When the mouse moves over the headings, a list of subheadings appears underneath. Moving the mouse down onto the new list lets you choose one of those things, or moving the mouse over another heading closes the first list and opens the new one.
I know all of this is more about technique and how to do things without any regard as to how they look, but I'd rather have the knowledge of how to do things first. I can worry about making them look good later. Actually, I think I'll build a sample site (or rework my portfolio) using these techniques as a sort of practice project.

Fall 2010: Update 5

There's been a lot of reading this week. I never thought I'd say that I'd read most of a text book in only a week, but I can say it now. There's just a few chapters of the HTML book left to finish reading. The book started with really basic things like how to code a page with and tags. The higher chapters are where things get interesting. Some of the things in the higher chapters are things that a program like Dreamweaver will do for you, but I think it's better to be able to do them on your own. For example, one chapter explains how to embed video and other media in pages. There's also a chapter on forms that I'm really interested in; I just can't figure out how to get the scripts for the form to work right. Lots of great stuff left to look into, though.