Blogs

Post one: History of the web and blogging setup

1989 - the year the web was invented. Not initaly for social networking and youtube but to send and recieve messages to people during the Civil War. Amazing invention with such a capacity to develop long after im gone. Over the years the World Wide Web has been around connections all over the world have been made. The internet isnt just a place to learn and teach. It is a community. An invention that will be forever growing and one Sir Tim Berners - Lee would be very proud of. The 'language' of the web (Hypertext Transfer Protocol / HTTP) was created by Tim and a team to allow data communication within the web. I'm looking very forward to learning about this language in my future classes this semester. 
Seriously though. Look at this! amazing images of neurons in the brain, map of the internet and our galaxy looking so similar. Shows that we have the capacity to do great things like Sir Tim Bernes - Lee.

Source: http://robbdavis.com/internet-and-human-evolution-towards-a-noosphere

During my first class of the semester we also learnt the fundamentals of blogging and im loving the setting up of my own blog and seeing what my classmates are doing. I have found blogspot easy to use and enjoyed it alot. Ive blogged once in my life and i posted one thing and never looked at it again. This wont be the case this time though so keep your eyes open for my other topics and id appreciate your comments! :) I am also sharing my fave 10 blogs with you guys. Lucky! Hope you enjoy them as much as i do. 

1. Pinterest

2. Goop

3. Behance

4. Oh Yeah Studio


5. Wrap Magazine

6. Desktop

7. Garance Dore

8. Street Peeper

9. I Love Typography


10. Editorial Design Served

All of these blogs and sites are full of cool innovative design from the layout of the blogs themselves to the content on the pages. I love going through and finding new things that people are doing. I get inspired from this drive. The design of these blogs is successful because they are pleasing to the eye and they are also functional. These two factors make good design practice.




Post Two: How the web works, HTML intro, Social Media intro

This week was packed full of new things. I really enjoyed learning about HTML because its cool to see something change by placing certain letters in a white space. We used dearmweaver to make a site and we played around with headings, paragraphs, links, photos and a few other things. It was just like learning a new language!
We also set up Twitter accounts and were introduced to the ways to use the accounts. I had previously used Twitter but i didn't use it for the right reasons and i was very young and didn't know much about social media at that stage so it was good to go back and have a fresh start on it all. I learnt that you can use it as a source of information and inspiration which is always good.

Speaking of inspiration, I am going to put some photos up this week of what inspires me and i hope you all enjoy them as much as i do.




Post Three: Mark - Up structure & Twitter Feed Gadget

Week Three and we have learnt how to make a fully functional webpage. We went over the basics this class again which was helpful and then we also learnt how div's work which are like sections of a webpage. We also learnt about the break tag, the span tag, the list tags, the email tags and the HTML commenting methods. We structured a few webpages and got used to coding. I'm really enjoying learning about the mark up structure at the moment and i wanted to show you how it works visually so here are a before and after photo.

Before:

After:

This week we also placed a twitter gadget on our blog which you can find on the right sidebar ----->

This was good to learn as it becomes another link for people to refer to from my blog. I didn't know you could actually have one of these until now. It works like a feed. Each new Tweet will show up at the top so you can scroll through them or even visit the Twitter page itself. I put the Witt one up to reconise Witts art Twitter page and I am also going to put my own Twitter feed up when i make my first tweet!

Post Four: CSS Code

This week was my favourite week so far in web media. We got to see our website take shape and look like the design we started with. We used CSS which stands for cascading style sheets. Its called this because it is always cascading downwards. This was one problem we had to work with. The sections on the webpage were automatically placed one on top of each other and the design template had some sitting next to each other. This was just one of the things we learnt. I love the look of the web page at the moment. There are a few things we have to touch up next week but I love how we have created a webpage from scratch.




Post Five: Interface Design

This week we were let lose to make our own website and create it using the template from the evoke website. I chose to do mine on a snowboarding website where people can join up and showcase their talent and get feedback on their moves. I got stuck into finding photos for the site and creating a suitable name. I devised Peaked was a good name. Here are some screenshots of my home page and my about page.

Home page

About page

The images are screenshots from illustrator because they are still getting edited. Tell me what you think of them!




Post Six: CSS, slicing and image optimization

This week we started putting our website together. While doing this we learnt new techniques on how to get our images into CSS. By using the slice tool in illustrator or Photoshop we can crop out a part of the work and turn it into a image to put into our website. Below is where i am up to with my website.

Webpage Screenshot

CSS Screenshot

Post Seven: CSS menus and video embedding.

Today we learnt two different methods to making menu bars on our websites. The first one was made from Instamatic  we copyed the CSS code and put it into our file. We then went through and changed the size and details to make it ours.

Note: The Menu Bar

html structure for Menu Bar

The second method is called a sprite image menu bar and it is made by taking the html stucure of one and placing a image made from Photoshop on top of it. this allows it to become interactive. This is used alot on websites to make viewers more compelled to press on the button if it reacts to the cursor. I enjoyed doing this but found it quite hard. We also learnt ho to place a video onto our webpage. I found this weeks class really hard. there is so much to learn about html and CSS.  I really enjoy it when it turns out right but i need more practice in Dreamweaver.




Post Eight: Reflection

I have learnt so much over the past eight weeks to do with HTML and CSS. I didn't have a clue how any of it worked at the beginning and i really enjoyed going all the way back and start from scratch. I learnt heaps of new techniques on how to lay up a website and how to take the design and put it into html code. I also enjoyed the social media accounts and will use them even more now. I have also really enjoyed looking at other students blogs as they have some cool inspiration and work that i hadn't seen. I think everyone has benifitted from learning about code. I have a long way to go and alot more to learn but i want to keep trying even if it means i pull my hair out because of the stress! :) 

Thankyou all for reading,
Chloe Reid

:)