Blog Post 5 - Critique of Photoshop web layout tutorials

The three designs I chose to replicate were: Design a cool Photography Portfolio, Designing a Clean Photo Portfolio Site in Photoshop, and the Webstudio Layout Design.

The best thing about these designs are that they are free inspiration.  Each one has the ability to be customized.  Which in creating a website is very important.  There also were 27 different ideas on that blog.

The bad part about the designs is that they are over used around the web.  The first one I tried was because I have seen several sites with the exact same layout.  Knowing that you can start with that base design and change it seems to be a problem for some people.  They stick with the same colors and everything.  Also each one that I did (and maybe it was just my choices) were very graphic heavy.  That isn't good for a website.  The idea for an efficient website is to create it with the least load on you server.  These designs don't accommodate that.

Overall, I was very inspired by the different designs.  I will probably incorporate these into some of my future web designs.  I will just try to make them as good looking with less server calls.

Blog Post 4 - Define Design, Usability & Accessibility

From the started questions; designing for the web and for print are two different worlds.  My last job was for a hardware stores online store at their corporate office.  The department was in the same room that they sold the print flyers.  Many times I was approached to put a copy of the printed circulars on the website.  Time after time they failed.  No one wants to look at a static PDF page of flat images and text.  Finally they agreed to give me the data and let me build what I thought would work.  I created a department of the sale items.  It was searchable, sortable, and was much more adapted for the web.  So first hand experience says that print and electronic media are two separate beasts.

Design and usability are not the same thing; however, you website's design should be accessible and very user friendly.  In other words design encapsulates both usability and accessibility.

Accessibility is the ease that people can find the information that they are looking for on your website.  Usability is how easy they can get to that information.  When these work together with even a bad graphic design of a website can still make the website successful.

Blog Post 3 - Site Development

Website development is a very simple process if you look at it in the right way. The process starts with getting the requirements, goals, and any pieces that are going to be given to you from a 3rd party. From there a functional mockup of the base features should be started. With the users testing to ensure that is what they want and need from day 1. This process repeats itself as you add features and other pieces of the site. Once the site is complete the users would need to do some complete testing and then sign a user acceptance document.

My favorite part of the web development process is to write the code to the website. I enjoy creating the look of the site and then ripping it apart and creating the html and css behind the site. I am starting to look into php and .net so I can use some other functionality on the sites that I build. I also have been looking into incorporating HTML 5 into my sites, but I don't believe that all the browsers are compatible with HTML 5 yet. And not that I am lazy, but there is no point in writing efficient code just to have it fail or have to write alternate code for browsers that don't support all the features yet. We will get there soon enough.

Blog Post 2 - History of Internet

The history of the Internet:

Who knew, I thought Al Gore invented the internet! It was actually created in rare form back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was mostly used for intra-network communication; two or more stations could communicate with each other if they were on the same network. This officially was the start of the Internet, but none of us would recognize it.

In the 1980s there were many advancements to the Internet. More computers could talk to one another not being on the same network. Still this version is very foreign to what we are accustom to currently.

In the 1990s more and more computers were coming online and this created more of a demand online commerce and knowledge. The Internet in the 1990s was what most of us grew up on and remember it being extremely slow.

The most used features on the Internet from day 1 have been email and weblogs. Email has been around since the 1960s and weblogs just about as long, but didn't become popular until the late 1980s or early 1990s.

It is interesting to think that in 50 short years we have gone from computers not talking to each other to the current World Wide Web that we have now. I can't imagine what we are going to have 50 years from now.