Final - Megan McFadden

A: I chose to create my site for my "make-believe" graphic design business ... which I plan on starting up for real sometime this year when I'm not so busy. My target audience is very general, it is mostly targeted towards businesses but also regular people who are in search of graphic design services. I chose to keep my site well organized with consistent navigation so it is easy for the user to navigate through. I chose my color scheme based on how I want my company branding to look; it is not tailored for a specific audience. My logo needs work ... but I don't want to waste too much time on that right now.

B: I actually didn't experience any trouble shooting this time around, other than missing a closing p tag. I may have had problems with the image navigation but I pulled my hair out over that on the midterm. Now that I have that figured out, this site was pretty easy for me ... except for the fact that I spent WAY too much time on it and now I'm panicking about studying for my microbiology final.

C: The images provide an example of the designs I have created at my jobs. I hope it contributes to my website since it shows the viewer what my designs are like. I created a thin border and padding around all of the images to help them stand out a little better.

D: I kept my table pretty simple and clean. I made a different color for the headers, made the main items bold, and created a border around everything so it is easy to follow.

E: I had a HORRIBLE time finding media to fit into my site. For my real site, I will not be including any media. For the purpose of this assignment, I found a video regarding the graphic design process and added a link to it so the viewers can watch if it their curious about how the design process works. The video is on YouTube, so the user will need a flash plug-in.

F: I didn't have any problem validating, it went really smooth for me. I just had that missing ending p tag at one point, but that was easily fixable.

G: I added in meta tags, description and keywords, below the title tag to help search engine crawlers index my site. I also tried to use the text "graphic design" a lot throughout my site. I created a Facebook page for my pretend company and added a link to that page (which needs work, of course, but I'll do this once I make the site officially live), and also added a link to my LinkedIn account. I also added a link to my final site on each of the sites I linked to (does that make sense)? I chose to link to these sites in an attempt to benefit from the social media and SEO concept.

H: My browser experience went great! I was really happy that everything looked right in all the browsers I tested (Chrome 8.0-windows, Firefox 3.6-windows, Firefox 3.6-OSX, IE 8.0-windows, IE 9.0 Beta-windows, Safari 5.0-OSX, IE 7.0 -windows, IE 6.0-windows, Firefox 4.0 Beta 7 -windows). The only real issue I had was the .png image rendering in Internet Explorer 6.0 does not seem to catch the transparency on my navigation. I chose not to change this at this time, but I will figure out how to manipulate the graphics so I don't have to use a .png. I do plan on using the browser labs as long as it is available.

I: For the testing requirements, I used the W3Cvalidator for all of my HTML and CSS to make sure it validated, and fixed any errors I had. I checked all of my links and they work just fine. I used http://www.cynthiasays.com/ to test my accessibility and my site passed the verification checklist; I had no warnings.

J: My final site