FINAL PROJECT

NOVEMBER 17

Horizontal Header/Nav Bar

Vertical Header/Nav Bar

NOVEMBER 24

This is an idea of how the site would look above the fold with the horizontal header/navbar. In the header I chose to let words run out of the box (i.e. SmackDown) because I figured your eye would still finish the word. Besides, wrestlers don't always stay inside the ring.

There are buttons on each of the content boxes. The user would be able to choose what boxes appear in what order. For certain content they could also choose whether they wanted their content to pertain to a certain program.

Most of the current homepage is dedicated to the WWE shop, so I chose to make it a content box. It would show products based on what information you view. So if a lot of the content you view is about The Undertaker, you're going to see his latest t-shirt, for example.

November 10th

I wasn't able to get my proposals on the website yet. By the time I got to that point I just didn't have the time, but I do have time to put the images on here.

I worked on this one yesterday and it's obviously not finished (I'm going to work on it more now, and I'll post an updated on later, but I'll put this up now just in case EDIT: done!). I was trying to get a more 'kinetic' feeling to this one. I wanted to convey the action and chaos that is professional wrestling. This would just be the homepage. I'm not sure how I would lay out secondary pages yet.

I just used the links from the top nav bar for now, but I think it's too little. I would have to find a way to get more information into it. I think one of the negatives would be that it would have to just be an image with links over it. I mean, I don't how bad that really is, but it just seems like it might not be the best option, so I might have to think about that.

This is a very rough approximation of my second idea. It was sort of drawn from the Zen Garden in that the user could choose how the site looks. By choosing 'appearance' on the top nav bar the user could choose a theme based on the wrestler of his choice. It would be a database driven site so that the content would all be the same no matter how you change the site. The user would also be able to choose what they see on their homepage. So if they only watch RAW, they could decide that they want to see RAW results on their homepage, but not ECW results. Since WWE attracts as many kids as it does adults, perhaps there could be specific content geared towards kids, so Junior could have his own WWE page geared towards his age group. You would also be able to rearrange the different boxes so the things that are most important to you are right up top.

The only major problem I have with this is that it's very boxy, not unlike how the website currently is.

My last proposal I do not have a picture for, mostly because as I worked on it, I liked it less and less. It basically used to image of a WWE championship belt and turned it into a nav bar of sorts. I ultimately found it limiting, however. I may try to rework it in some way into whatever design I ultimately choose.

November 3

I've been thinking about my final project and I have an idea for what site I would like to redesign. The only problem is it isn't one of my original websites from the beginning of the semester. Looking at those websites, I don't think I'd really want to redesign any of them. Two of the five I didn't really like.

One, gocomics.com I guess I could do if I absolutely had to do one from that class, although I have no proposals for it as of yet. The reason I really don't want to do that site is that it's largely a paysite, and since I don't subscribe to it, I have a limited knowledge of the workings of the website as it is. If that makes sense. Also, I just really have no desire to do it.

The second site I hated was pinupgirlclothing.com. At first I really wanted to redesign this site to see if I could make it seem less trashy (because a lot of their stuff really isn't). But I feel like I would just end up using yahoo shops or something similar and it wouldn't be much of a challenge.

What I do want to redesign is WWE.com. Being as big a franchise as it is, it's not surprising that they have a ton of information and it's all crammed into the homepage. I find it to be cluttered and uneccessary. I wanted to find a way to simplify it and make it easier to navigate through the plethora of information.

My first idea is an attempt to come up with a much different type of navigation. I thought of using a picture of a championship belt and using the different parts as links to the different parts of the site. My only concern is that the way I see it now, it only allows for about four or five link which I'm afraid might be too simplistic unless I find a way to really simplify the organization of information.

My other idea, and the one I like a lot more at this point, is somewhat based off the idea of Zen Garden. The user would be able to choose a layout based on the wrestler of their choice. I've yet to decide if only the background image and colour scheme would change or the entire layout. I'm thinking about doing away with the entire left hand navigation that exists on the current site and using only the top nav bar (which would remain largely the same). This nav bar would be a sort of constant between all the different layouts you could choose. I'm also toying with the idea of being able to move around and reorganize the different blocks of information on the site, much like blogger. Although I haven't yet put much thought into the design of secondary pages - like articles - I think they would fit into the scheme of the user's choice so that no matter where he goes on the site, it's always "his own."

October 27

SQL (Structured Query Language) is a programming language associated with databases. It breaks up into two sublanguages. DDL is used to create and destroy databases and the data within them. DML is used to manipulate and edit existing data. A DBMS can hold and allow an administrator to control several independent databases. There are different tables within a database.

A database is a collection of records or data stored in a computer. The data is organized according to some sort of model.

Filemaker, as I understand it, is a program used to work with databases. Until recently, each table was saved as a seperate file, although several tables can now be saved to a single document. I think it allows the user to drag information and drop it wherever you need it to be, rather than just typing commands.

October 20

Well, I went to Wikipedia to read up about web servers. I generally got the gist of how it works, but I feel like because the Internet is put together by techies who know how these things work a lot of information can be way too complicated for a novice like myself. So I went to youtube where at least if it was complicated, I'd have some visual that might help me understand it. I found this video that's from a Harvard extension school.

I had a lot of trouble finding something that told me what web server applications actually were instead of the different kinds. I ended up reading about APIs, though I'm not sure if that's what I needed to know. What I can gather is that a web server application formulates specific information based on user input, rather than just taking the user to a pre-formulated page (I hope that makes sense).

FTP was equally if not more complicated. It's a protocol, like HTTP. It's used for transferring data between computers. Apparently, you can also use it to hack usernames and passwords. I found a lot about the different FTP clients. I assume that anytime I download something off the Internet I'm using FTP.

DNS translates hostnames into IP addresses. The address I read from right to left in order to find the website. So when I type in the address of my blog (ktlawton.blogbspot.com) it looks for "com" first, which subdivides into "blogspot" which subdivides into "ktlawton1642." So it works from the general (com) to the specific (ktlawton1642). It's difficult to understand that in most cases "www" is the most specific just because it appears before almost everything and in a lot of cases typing in example.com will bring you to the same place as www.example.com.

CHMOD has to do with permissions. I guess this is what is used when you have to register for a site before you can use it. For instance when looking for custom content for the Sims you encounter a lot of "paysites" where you have to donate money to the site before you can access certain files. This was actually pretty easy to understand thanks to this website http://catcode.com/teachmod/index.html.

I'm still very much a novice and a lot of this is still Greek to me, but I think I'm started to get a better grasp on it.

October 6

Alas, one of the things that did not translate from my Dreamweaver 4 book was divs. I couldn't even find it in the book. I ended up going back to youtube to find a tutorial. I ended up using this one:

I've looked at other dreamweaver tutorials made by the same person before. I think he makes it easy to understand for the most part. It's especially helpful to me because I can see where he's finding all the tools in the program whereas if I use a book I sort of have to figure out where everything is for myself.

I decided to try to copy the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab homepage for class (http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com/). I used only divs to make the website. Thanks to the tutorial I watched, I found it pretty easy for the most part. I did have some problems, though. When I got up to the main text on the page, I didn't know how to make it in one box that would wrap around the main image, so I ended up making two separate divs, one to the right of the image and one underneath.

I also did not know how to use a custom font as they did on the left nav bar, so I just stuck with a default font. I was afraid if I tried using a different font I would end up with something that can't be seen on all browsers.

On the BPAL website, when you hover over the text in the left nav bar, it changes from gray to black. I also did not know how to replicate this.

For the most part, I think I managed to replicate the site pretty well.

EDIT:

I posted comments on the blogs of Valerie, Ivana, and Brandon.

Sept 29

After a crazy week or so I finally found some time to get to the computer lab with my Dreamweaver 4 for Dummies book and try to translate it to CS3. So far the translation's been pretty easy.

I tried to change the page size, but I can't tell if it actually changed anything.

Then I learned how to put the date and time on a page. I don't know if I'd ever use that on a web page... I guess I just don't see the point on anything other than a blog maybe. Well, I guess you could put "last update: [date]" on your page if you wanted to.

In order to play with text I put a simple nav. bar on top (Home About Us Contact Us Blog Shopping Cart Wishlist). I didn't want to change the format because we were talking about how people make things headers that really aren't headers and they shouldn't do that. I don't really understand why, to be honest. Anyhow, I didn't want to mess with that, so I just played with font, colour, size, and alignment, which might be just as bad, but I don't really know. I made the nav bar text into it's own style.

I played with the page properties. I added a background image. That was terrible. I couldn't read any of the text. I did find an image that wasn't as bad. I kept it for the time being, but I probably wouldn't use one on my own site.

I'm kind of curious to know what a tracing image is and how it works.

I made a table and filled it with images and it looked pretty good in dreamweaver, but as soon as I tried to preview it, it said only the image names where the picture should have been. I tried saving the page to my i-pod (in lieu of a thumb-drive), where the images were saved, but then it couldn't find my page. But it's too late for me to go crazy over it. It's getting late. I'll see if I can get it to work tomorrow, or I'll just start fresh since it was really just an experiment today anyway.