evaluation

if i were to do this project again, i would do it completely different. in the beginning i thought i was making it simple for myself but i think i ended up making it harder by having i specific template to stick to. the small space that i had to write text, meant there was enough room for the text but not the images. in order to appeal to my target audience i think it is quite important to have images, however the background livens up the page a little, it does need some more images. i am pleased with the flash recycling arrows, it makes the website more 3-dimensional rather than being flat and motionless.

problems with testing

when testing my website on other computers the background i had imported did not show up. the reason for this was that i had exported the slices from photoshop as .jpegs that were saved for the web. however when i imported these into dreamweaver i assumed that when importing an image, that dreamwever copies it to the site rootfolder. however this didn't happen so i instead i had to not save the background for web but just import the .jpeg which worked fine once they were copied into the images folder.

implementation

This has been an extremely hard process for me as i am learning as i go along, and to make matters even harder, the dreamwever help isn't working!
I have realised that my design of the website has definatly made things harder when it comes to implementing my ideas.

Although, i did manage to use some actionscript to make my recycling symbol spin and then reverse spin as the mouse rolls off the image. i like this as it makes my website look less 2d. i have also made some of the text into flash buttons so the colour changes as the mouse hovers over the links.

if i had more time, and a little more experience i feel that i could have made this website much more user friendly. As it stands, the website is simple and easy to navigate to so my initial aims have been fulfilled.

website design

So far i have felt restricted in the design of my website. i should have had the navigation bar at on the left hand side, the text in the centre and the sponsors on the right hand side, with the main banner at the the top. this way the browser could have been expanded with the left and right side staying the same size, and the text expanding. however, the reason i didn't use this technique is because when i did this beofore, i found that when the text moved, so did the images (if there were any) would move too, looking out of place.

The way i have designed my website means that when the browser stretches, the text stays the same. it is possible to enlarge this text for people who find it hard to read small text.

As this is only my second time designing a website, i am still learning as i go along.
I would feel much more confident if i had done this a few more times, then i would know what works and what doesn't when it comes to design.

First Steps

Yesterday i went down to the New art exchange, although i have left it quite late i managed to secure a client for next year. After chatting to Pam we came to an agreement that the gallery is not known about by many people therefore through the use of multimedia, i will bring people to the gallery. However, when visitors get to the gallery, they tend to get lost in the space, so a map or 3d walk through would be useful to put on the website, so that visitors know there is a second exhibition. I am looking forward to starting this project and having the experience of a real client.

Navigation Bar Hotspots

I have sliced the jpeg images in photoshop so it can be imported as sections in dreamweaver. However, when i imported the slices into dreamweaver when i the middle section to add the text, the whole image distorted.

For the navigation bar i added image tags onto the text. I am aware that this probably isn't the best way to do this, however it does what i want it to do, so i am not going to jeopardize time to to something more complicated. If i have time during the testing stage, then i will alter this problem then.

The next stage is to add the links and the text to my web pages in dreamweaver. i am finding dreamweaver quite hard to actually put sections into my website because it means that the slices i created in photoshop move around because there is not enough space on the page, making everything take alot longer to do than i had expected.

New Website Layout

Following the new layout for the home page, i have created the other pages based on this layout. On each page i will change the navigation bar to match the colour of the page.