Midterm Web Site

The site I designed was for my seven year old Niece, Sicilia. A while back her father (my brother) had asked me if I could create one for her so I took this mid-term opportunity to do so. the link for the site is:
http://sws.pcc.edu/student/CAS206_pdeangel_13645/vickiknapton32/Midterm/Part%201/sicilia_home.html

Overall, the design and implementation went smoothly. I was surprised, actually, at how smoothly things went (well, I guess the true judgment will come with my grade...) I really learned a lot during this process and it was a good refresher of all that was taught so far. I think the colors and design came together well, and coding went well.

As mentioned, my target audience is the pre-teen girl group. That said I wanted bright colors, lots of space, lots of "chunking" of text and objects. I also took into consideration font size an type. Since that age group is just learning to read, large easy-to-read text was important. I adjusted the spacing of the text on the headlines to make it more legible as the yellow and blue wasn't as much of contrast as the black on white copy.

I tested the site in three browsers: Chrome, Safari and Firefox with the majority of the inital testing in Firefox. Firefox and Safari basically showed the same overall. Chrome set some of my copy in serif style when it was set up as sans. The major stumbling block I encountered was with the navigation. I tried placing a different backgrounds colors for different actions (IE hover = yellow, visited=blue) and it was not working out, especially in chrome which left a black bock for the "visited" action. I eventually took some of the backgrounds off, and left others.

I really enjoy troubleshooting (ok, is that weird?) I feel like I'm doing the XHTML equivalent of the NY Times Sunday crossword puzzle, only this comes with validation. Literally. It really helped in class the other day when Patti reminded me of best practices in regards to coding. Also kept a lot of best practices in mind in regard to design. This included lots of white space, use contrast, and of course, siteness.