Zen Garden Critques

Kyle Beikirch and I looked at several Zen Garden CSS designs. Among all of them, my favorite design was the old theater, I felt that this design was the most successful in engaging me and in creating the most realistic virtual space. I was also impressed with the scrolling being contained withing the main divisions. At first we didn't believe it was done with divisions, and viewed the source code to see if frames had been used- they weren't. The sublet stylistic elements of the chairs and stage were very convincing. The only right and left stage graphics seem a bit jagged, and the top seems to simple and vector to be a true recreation of an old theater. Another good small detail is the static within the main division, to give the feel of an old spotty projection. The typography on the actual website is hard to read, and I feel that it could have been positioned better, but solely judging the CSS layout I feel that it is overall successful.

The designed that I did not like was the CSS layout entitled "A walk in the Garden". The Top Image and the overall color scheme is well done. However my main problem is the verticalness of the website. Personally when I go to a website I find scrolling down to be a chore, in this website the entire website is hidden below the original window, which weakens it. Personally I just get impatient and get immedieatly frustrated with the site itself.

CSS rediscovered!

I hadn't used a seperate CSS file since IMM, but after looking over the actual code I found it very easy to apply it to my html file. Using this as a basis it should be fairly easy to adapt this to any number of customizable styles. At first I had trouble getting the columns to all appear, and I kept getting a second column appearing above the header. The problem was I had accidentally created two right columns so it was creating a second one above the first. I fixed this by just creating blank copies of each column: rightcolumn, rightmiddle, leftcolumn, leftmiddle.

The two scripts I used were the time script at the bottom of the page, and the drop down menu for a list of links. In the link-menu I changed the links to show my work, and I also included a link to an in progress flash portfolio that I uploaded to the gibson server now that I learned how to get in via terminal from my home computer.

CSS Home Site

At first my website was just simple text, but after the in class explanation I added a bit of CSS to it to give it a better look and feel. I hadn't used CSS very extensively and didn't really see the overall benefit until the correlation between styles and classes were made. It makes it easy to create a solid unified style by defining styles. I'm excited at the prospect of only having to carefully code a ew style elements then apply those to divisions.

I found the w3 tutorial really helpful in understanding CSS conceptually. (http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp)

First Assignment

I hadn't used html in a while and it was very unfamiliar. I had to revalidate several times to iron out my syntax errors. I had the most trouble getting the text to show up in the body, the problem was that I had forgotten to place the text with an "p" "/p" tag and kept getting validation errors as a result. Overall with the in class linux excerise I feel it was a good review of previous Intro to Multimedia skills.

HTML Recipe

XHTML Recipe

First!

Blogging!