Final Project - Christina Mort

Website link:

http://sws.pcc.edu/student/CAS206_pdeangel_43992/christinamort21/Final/index.html

a. Who is your target audience? What design choices did choose to attract your audience to your site?

I decided to keep my audience fairly broad. It’s targeted at just about anyone interested in Japan and its culture, ages 15+. I tried not to clutter it with too many distracting images, but just enough that it might keep the attention of younger people as well as older.

b. What troubleshooting did you experience?

My trouble shooting usually revolved around links. I constantly had trouble trying to get the links to look the way I wanted in different browsers. For example, firefox would show the links correctly, but wouldn’t change when clicked like it was meant to. When in Internet explorer, after clicking the links, the background and border would all vanish. I’m afraid I didn’t have the time to try and put in a background or other such things, so the links still aren’t quite right. Besides link issues, I also had problems with images. It can get confusing as the images build up, especially since when you’re trying to use one, the size of that image and the file type make a big difference.

c. How did the images you use contribute to your website’s purpose? Did your CSS style add to the “siteness” of your website?

I believe the images really help to make the site less boring. Each image was used depending on the information in each section. For example, information on Feudal Japan was decorated with pictures of a shrine, and kanji, both relating to things that made a big impact in that time frame.

d. What style choices did you make to improve the readability of your table?

Because the information in my table could easily become confusing (seeing as it’s about a different language), I made sure to make the borders thick, so it was easy to tell which section each part went to.

e. How did the media you created contribute to the purpose of your website? What plug-ins does the end user need to display-play?

I used only one video, and that video went into the language section. It was just a little video about the basic greetings in Japanese that I felt were important to know.

f. Describe your validating experience.

I rarely had any troubles validating, except when I got to the nested unordered list. I could not figure out why on earth the list wasn’t validating! After a while of being frustrated, and finally turning to the W3C site, I figured it out. Besides that, the only thing that still refuses to validate is the media, which was to be expected. xD

g. How did integrating SEO best practice change or improve your website.

Using the keywords and description helped make my site easier to find for the browser.

h. Discuss your browser lab experience. Will you continue using the browser labs?

I was a little frustrated by the browser lab, since it viewed the browsers differently than if I actually had the real browser open. I’ll probably continue using it in the future, but it won’t be the only thing I use.

Strategy to promote site

I relied heavily on the site keywords and description to help promote my site. The few sites I did include inside my site probably weren’t that popular, but I found them very useful/educational.

Testing

b. Both CSS and HTML all validated, except for the page with a youtube video on it.

c. All links went where they were suppose to, although they didn’t all view correctly.

d. According to the achecker site, there was a problem with most of my navigation links. It also mentioned something about my document language not being specified.

e. I suppose the user experience and usability go hand in hand…I kept the site very consistent, the links and banner were always meant to be the same. Even though the page layouts may have differed slightly, the text and font was almost always very similar.

i. I tried to enhance the user experience by making it very easy to navigate the site, and know which part of the site you are currently on. The links are always large and at the top of the page, while at the beginning of each section is a title, telling you exactly what it’s about. I also attempted to not overload pages with too much information, but I found that increasingly difficult when I reached the history section.

Adobe Browser lab

Broswers used: Chrome 7.0, Firefox 3.6, and Internet Explorer 8.0.

Chrome viewed everything correctly, the links were all in the correct place. However, Firefox made the navigation links appear larger, and pushed one of them onto a second line instead of keeping them all straight. Internet explorer was the worst of all three. The first link was different from the rest, and also pushed the last link onto a different line.

I made no changes after looking at the three on browser lab. They were issues I had been dealing with during the whole project. And I was a little confused, since browser lab seemed to display the navigation links differently (correctly) if you used the actual browser, compared to browser lab.