Mid-Term: Scrabble Site

Scrabble: The Next Level Up

a) What worked well?
I started the site by gathering info and graphics from the internet (in real life, I would have got permission to use all the graphics, of course!). I took the logo into adobe.kuler to get the colors for the site. I really like the color scheme - it has a bold look, and is pretty flexible for color choices.

b) Who is your target audience? What design choices did you use to attract your audience to your site?
The target audience for this site is casual living room players of Scrabble, who enjoy the game with family and/or friends. They may be unaware that the game has evolved into a competitive "sport" (along the lines of texas hold'em -it's just not as lucrative). This site gives them just a peek behind that curtain. The audience is male and female, from ages 16 to 86, weighted towards the 40 to 60 yr old crowd.
The design uses familiar Scrabble cues and imagery that any player would already have been exposed to.

c) What browsers did you test in? What differences did you see?
I tested in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome (on MAC platform) with no issues. I noticed a difference in the way Firefox treats the background border attribute, "ridge". Firefox has a sharp chiseled look, while both Safari & Chrome give it a soft, blended round look. Otherwise, I don't see much difference.

d) What troubleshooting did you experience?
I'm not 100% happy with the "link" and "visited" state of the hyperlinks. I wrestled with that for a while before discovering by chance, my stylesheet had duplicate sections of the 4 states. One section was nearer to the top of the stylesheet, while the other was lower, out of view. So I suspect when I was trying to tweak the look, I was making changes to one or the other. So some of my frustration with the tweak results was due to that. I trashed one set, worked with the other, but still was unable to land on a look I'm really happy with.

e) Describe your validating experience.
First, I didn't realize you needed to run the HTML validator separately on each page. I assumed when you ran it, it would check all the pages of the site. So I had some fixes on each page.
Second, two of the errors pointed to a hyperlink URL address I copied from the address bar. It contained an ampersand and an equal-to sign that the validator had a problem with. When I converted them manually to the ascii code, they validated.
Third, I had an internal anchor that surrounded the h3 section head. The error said I could not do that. I just moved the closing attribute behind the opening and it worked fine.

f) What practices discussed in class assisted in your productivity?
Well-formed code made construction of the site faster, and hunting down errors easier.

g) Up top.