Final Project - Vicki Knapton

For my Final Project I decided to create a website, with my bosses full permission, for a book publishing company (Graphic Arts Books) I consult/work for.

a. My target audience are people interested in Alaska and Northwest books. This covers a large span of people as the books GAC publishes range from Photo-essay, childrens illustrated titles, cookbooks and non-fiction titles. I choose easy to read classic font styles, and colors that convey the feelings of the northwest and Alaska (blues and greens)

b. I have yet to master the box model....but I feel I'm getting better. That was my main issue. I also do not know what the secret is to using background: url(graphics/name.jpg) as I cannot for the life of me get this function to work. a little disappointing, but because of this I was unsuccessful with the rollovers, and probably would have implemented the technique in places like the table head.

c. the majority of the images used are front covers from the company. I picked the most important titles to feature (new releases and upcoming events). I also used a shot of mt. hood to convey "northwest". the colors of the shot tied in with the o/a site very well also.

d. I chose a border that matched the border of the website (double) I aligned the text right for column a and left for column b. to tie the lines better together. I used colors for the head and background to make the table still readable but that allow it to pop. I did not use lines between rows as I thought this would be overkill.

e. One of the upcoming events was for a book about a foot race. I chose media about the footrace to give people who may not be familiar with it exactly how cool the race and the mountain it is named for are.

f. I had no problems getting my code to validate using firefox validator in the the web toolbar. being careful to check and re-check my code as I designed it was very helpful. I triple checked all links to make sure they worked. and I checked for accessibility using cynthiasays.com (it passed!)

g (SEO) Although Graphic Arts Books name is perhaps not as well known as it's titles, or it's parent company (Ingram) so for the Keywords and meta tags I utilized these aspects. I also focused on a major subject of the company: Alaska as this has less competition then the general subject of publishing. A couple changes I made for better optimization: to my surprise, I noticed GAB's parent company Ingram Publishing services URL didn't receive as high rating as Ingram Content Group's URL so I added both to the "about" page. I also added more descriptive text to the title of each page.

I did use Browserlabs, and will continue to use it in the future. I noticed chrome windows and Firefox (mac) and Safari seemed to be very similar. while other windows browsers seemed to shift my logo head left and right. I tried to adjust this, but it was never consistent from browser to browser which way it would shift so I had to leave it. Not sure how to resolve this - smaller image or absolute positioning perhaps.