Hello Class! Feel free to go check out
part 1 of my midterm.
Here is a summary of how things went:
a) I was able to snag the "backbone" of my code from our Java Jam assignment and that made starting a new page from "scratch" easier. (Kind of like the muffins I made from "scratch" the other day, but most of the ingredients came out of a box). Okay, I kid here. I did keep the basic layout of the Java Jam assignment because it worked for what I wanted to do, but I changed it quite a bit. That was a couple of weeks ago, so I don't remember everything, but I do recall playing with the width and that was fun.
b) Christine's target audience would mostly be mom's (or the women of the household) who want to order specialty cakes for their events, but are economically conscience as well. Christine has been using business cards for the past year or so and sent me a link to the card. I tried to snag the image of the card so I could upload it onto Adobe Kuler, but that proved to be one of the more difficult parts of this assignment for me. I believe the folks who make the business cards have heavier copyright restrictions on their site because copying and saving the image was extremely difficult. I finally forfeited and accepted the tiny picture I got from my attempts and used that in Kuler. It wasn't ideal, but it worked. And thus, my color scheme was born. I used white for my background because I read somewhere that some 80/85% of the top 50+ websites have black text on white backgrounds.
Sidenote: I originally snagged a photo off of Christine's facebook of a super nice cake she did with swans on it. It showcased her work well, and had a nice color palette with white, greens, blues, brown, black, and ivory. I thought that the cake used as a type of logo and the color scheme would work well for her target market. But, since she already has cards I figured they should match. Pink and brown look really good together, and it works for selling cakes to moms, (even if that color combo is a little 2008).
c) I tested my site in Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome (since I couldn't upload IE on my Mac without having Windows installed). Very slight, barely visible differences between the three - except for one thing - my CSS properties for my external absolute link (which I used a class selector for) would not work in Safari. So frustrating! All validated in Firefox, and it looks right in both Firefox and Chrome, so after some failed troubleshooting I ended up tossing it up as a minor loss.
d) Troubleshooting - Well, you just read my example above, but what else? The main issue was getting my ordered list to actually order itself. It was wanting to adopt the styles I assigned for my unordered list, even though my ordered list was farther down in the cascade. So, my first move was to apply a class selector to it. When I first started doing this I was applying it to the ordered list tag and that didn't work. Finally, after fiddling around a bit, I applied it to each line tag in my ordered list and it worked!
e) My validating experience went well. When I'd check it periodically whether things were going as planned or not, it would either pass, or fail and easily point out that I was missing something minor in my code. A good tool to help me find my coding typos!
f) Since there isn't a lot to this site as of yet, I didn't get an opportunity to take advantage of all of my best practices knowledge. However, I kept the pages short and repeated the general look of the site (colors, font, navigation, header, footer, etc) on all of the pages. I also added the background color to the header and footer so there wouldn't be too much white space, and to add some interest. Also, when my text/paragraphs looked too close together (mainly because the page is so short to begin with) I added some paragraph tags with non-breaking spaces inbetween to my code to space things out more and expand the page.
g) If you didn't see it at the beginning of my post, here is another opportunity to check out
Cakes by Christine.Thank you!
Jenee
