For my final project, I created a gallery of several pieces of art I've been making over the years. The scans are by no means as good as they ought to be, but I intend to rectify that as soon as I can find out what's wrong with my scanner.
For the moment, my target audience is mainly people in my class, my family and friends, and myself. Once I build up a more substantial body of work (and some better image files) I hope to unleash my web site upon the masses. Free of textured backgrounds and having a minimum of decorative images, my web site is specially designed to load fairly quickly with dial-up modems. I myself still have dial-up for now, and it is my understanding that people in many rural areas are stuck with dial-up as their only internet option.
My site consists of several pages. There is an Introductory or "Home" page, with my name, the name of the page, and one of my drawings. On the Home page there is also an "Alternate CSS" link. Clicking this link will show you what the home page would look like with the "Orange Layout."
In my navigation box, there is also a link to this paper, my assignments for class, as well as a link to the Zen Garden extra credit project, should I ever get around to finishing that. There is a brief Bio page, one to which I hope to add once I manage to accomplish something noteworthy, as well as a Contact page. The latter contains links to my email and Myspace page, as well as sites from which you will be able to buy my stuff someday. The Contact page also includes miscellaneous links of interest.
I have also included pages that feature my artwork; these are the most important content on the site, and the very reason for the site existence (other than the class requirement, of course). There are three categories: Paintings, Drawings, and Leather Craft. The paintings are selections from my Senior Show at Berea, in addition to a sneak preview of a painting I'm currently working on. The drawings are illustrations I did for the Spooky QAGS role-playing game, and a link to the QAGS Site is included on the page. The leather items are projects I completed last year.
The art categories each have an Intro Page. Each Intro Page features a series of thumbnails, with the instruction to "Click a thumbnail to see larger image." Instead of showing a miniature version of the full-sized image, the thumbnails show only a small segment. It adds to the mystery and surprise when the viewer, upon clicking the link, exclaims, "Ah, so that's what that is!" I cribbed this idea from the Wayne Barlowe site.
I had several design challenges with my site. First, I wanted the two designs to look completely different, without sacrificing usability. I didn't just want to change the colors and fonts. So I used CSS to change my menu design so that it runs across the top of the page in one CSS file and is in a little box off to the side in the other file.
In my "Black and Red" layout, my little menu box was misplaced on certain pages. This was apparently an HTML issue, as I ended up tweaking the offending pages in HTML until they learned to behave. I'm not quite sure how I got it to work; only that somehow the box now stays firmly in place from page to page.
Another challenge I had when developing this site was making it look the same in both Mozilla and Internet Explorer. I never use IE, so I was shocked at all the weird little things it did to my layouts. Fortunately, with a few tweaks here and there, I was able to achieve fairly uniform results.
In the "Orange" layout, I had some problems with my menu tabs "doubling up" in certain browser sizes. In this case, I decided not to fight it. I just lengthened my tabs and figured that the extra spaces might be needed should I ever want to add more links to the menu.
The images in my site contain a lot of different textures and color schemes. One of the things I wanted to do with my layout was to choose colors that would look good with my image files. I'm not sure how well I accomplished this in the Orange Layout, however. The colors look good on some monitors (to me anyway), and not so good on others. The Black Layout works a little better, color-wise, since black pretty much goes with everything.
I don't believe that CSS really hindered my ability to create the look I was after, other than it being a challenge to learn in the first place. It definitely helped me create a consistent look throughout all my pages, one which I can change around with a few clicks of the mouse.
I don't think I can honestly say that my design is really the best design, but it works for me right now. I believe that keeping the design simple enables me to easily spot any problems that arise, and make any necessary changes. Plus the door is left wide open for me to experiment with any new Web Design techniques I discover in the future.