Final- Amy Petit

a) My target audience for this website is artists and potential patrons for my dad's sculpture work. I chose to make this an online portfolio and in order to attract the audience to the site, kept it very clean and simple. I didn't want to overwhelm the viewer with sculpture pieces so I edited it down to key pieces and made pdf links if people would want to see more samples. I chose a darker blue and brighter green for the background and chose to keep the area on the work bright to draw attention to the pieces. I also provided details on the construction materials and contact info for my dad.

b) I had to do a lot of troubleshooting with the navigation. The image rollovers were giving me a little trouble at first but after going back and looking at the midterm code I was able to make it work properly.

c) The images were critical to showing the sculpture work. I used them in the header and in order to get some variety - I kept the design of the header the same but swapped out the images. I chose to use a large picture on the front page as a "feature" which can be changed out as new pieces become available. The mobile and sculpture pages each contain six images so the viewer can get a sense of the some of the pieces. I think the CSS styles were so important in helping keep the site cohesive - though I was pleased to see that if I broke the link to the stylesheet the hierarchy remains due to the use of the h1, h2 and p tags.

d) In order to improve the readability of the site, I made sure there was good contrast between the background and text. I also provided alt tags and a summary for the table to help with assistive reading devices.

e) I used the media as an example of one of my father's artistic influences. It's a short time-lapse video of an Alexander Calder sculpture. This is a link to YouTube so the user would need the latest version of Adobe Flash player.

f) I validated the site as I designed it which made errors much easier to troubleshoot. The mobile page with the media generates an error as we knew it would. One thing I noticed that I do is I will accidentally put the "&" symbol in and validating is great for catching that it either needs to be "and" or the ASCII character.

g) SEO was an interesting process - It made me aware when I was writing the content of the phrases I was using particularly in the headlines, subheads and title bar. I used keywords and descriptions in the meta tags to help the search engine find the site. I also used linkpopularity.com and chose to include the Idaho Commission on the Arts because it was both relevant to the content and and extremely popular site. The other links I included had decent traffic and are two places my dad has exhibited his work.

h) I thought Browser Lab was really cool - a great way to test out different operating systems and versions of browsers in one spot. I will definitely continue to use it.

i) I tested this site in OSX Firefox 3.6, Safari 5.0 and Chrome. I used Browser Lab to test in Internet Explorer 6.0 and 8.0 and Chrome for Windows. I used the onion skinning to observe the difference and the main thing I noticed was how Windows renders the type and borders. There was difference in positioning as well. None of the differences were so severe that I wanted to change anything.

j) Here is a link to my site: http://sws.pcc.edu/student/CAS206_pdeangel_13645/amypetit41/Final/final_website/