Melissa Loa’s Weblog

Last week, in Communications class, we had to create a web page off of memory. The class was split into two and the members of each group had to work with each other to create a working website with div codes and CSS. It’s surprising what one can learn and remember from only 5 classes.

We have been learning how to create CSS stylesheets, in our Web Overview class. Just last week, we learned how to create drop down menus. This week, we are supposed to create a coded entry. From what I have heard and understand, we are to type in the HTML box, not the visual. So, here goes nothing…

Practicing coding…

From what I have learnt from class so far, I have been working on my boyfriend’s portfolio website. We created this website last year, when we graduated from the Digital Animation program. He knew nothing about coding, and I knew very little from what I had taught myself from years ago.

As of late, I’ve decided to revisit the website to create it with proper coding, such as CSS and Div codes. Currently, it’s a simple static website, but we hope to add some flash, when I learn the more complex side of web developing. I’ll be working on his website ongoing, as it is good practice. Feel free to check out his art work, he’s a great (self taught) digital painter. He’s also an awesome 3D modeler!

Just for fun…

Here is an interesting website: Akinator. This website supposedly “reads your mind.” You think of a fictional, or non fictional character –whether it be in games, cartoons, actors and actresses, or family members, and the website guesses who you are thinking of. 

I’m curious as to how the creators built this website, the ”mind reader” from the website guesses what you’re thinking of with at least 15 general questions. Whatever they did, they definitely made a website that makes its users keep coming back.

Beware, it’s highly addicting.

Copy is an important part of a website. If the copy is full of fillers, then there really is no point to its existence. As of late, my peers and I have been learning about the importance of copy and how to write a good copy. I have been browsing through several websites to see how each copy is different (depening on their content and target audience.)

Let’s take a look at my two favourite music blogs.

Vinyl and Vodka & Ali’s Blog
In these two websites, there is little or mediocre amount of copy in both sites. The copy mostly promotes the (new or old) singer/band’s album, music videos, and singles –it describes what the single sounds like, and how they are liking the song/abum. Their target audience are mostly teenagers, young adults (in their 20s) who are into mainstream music (pop, hip hop, r&b, dance) or indie music. The target audience is clear, as the writing style is informal.

I am looking back on my past entries on WordPress from back when I was in the Digital Animation program and they are horrible; they have no title, no targeted audience, no content and filled with filler text. I’m reading through each entry, and I can tell that I was just blogging for the sake of blogging and finishing my assignment (I do recall… Val allowing us to blog about anything, given that we blogged about Digital Animation or the industry for half of the entry.) I did not learn much about copy writing back then, as I am learning now.

It is important to know how good copy looks like and whether or not it’s necessary to have a lot or little content on a website. I plan on improving my copy writing skills by looking through the copy of websites more thoroughly from here on in, so I can get a gist of what copy on the web should look like.  Someone could have a well built website, but what good is it, if they have bad (and unnecessary) copy on each page? They will end up scaring their users away.

A brief history about my interest in web development… at the age of twelve, I picked up web  design as a hobby. I started creating my very first website in Geocities with their page builder.  I would just drag, drop, upload pictures and place them wherever and Geocities would do the rest of the work. I would visit random  personal websites, and if I had liked anything (i.e. their colored scrollbar) I would view their source and try to figure out which code it was. Eventually, I taught myself  enough to be able to create my own website out of simple, basic HTML. I then transferred to Angelfire to further push and advance my knowledge, as Angelfire did not have a page builder which forced me to start from scratch. Back then, I did not know what CSS was, nor did I know how to create CSS stylesheets. I would go page per page, creating and editing codes which was extremely tedious and time consuming. If I forgot to to put in a “>” closing my tags, all hell would break lose and nothing would work;  I would spend a copious amount of time going through each page looking for that missing “>.” No, it was not fun at all. 

I’m new to CSS and I had only started learning about how to create stylesheets last week in Web Overview. I am, for lack of a better word, glad that we were taught how to create stylesheets and how to put it into our pages with just ONE code. I’m quite relieved that when I update future websites, I only have to update one file (the stylesheet). Although it can get confusing and almost seem impossible to understand, and a little disheartening when you spend such a long time on a page only to view it and see nothing working, I am most definitely enjoying this course. Lately, I’ve been working on creating a restaurant website for class as an assignment; we are to use div tags to create our menu, submenu, and content.  We were recently taught how to create three columns side by side, or two on top of one. I have never been taught how to create columns or create layouts from div tags, so this is all new (but useful) to me. Also, we were taught how to let the text wrap (or float) around the image using CSS. This is quite different from the way I used to align images (back then, I would manually align each image either left or right using <img src=”url” align=”right”>) which was also quite cumbersome. Out with the bad old, cumbersome ways and in with the better, easier, new ways!