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WEEK 5

http://colorsontheweb.com/ – This site covers pretty much anything I ever wanted to know about color; theory, combinations, physics, etc. It goes a little further in depth than the Beaird Chpt 2 did and offers some great tools, particularly the color wheel. Spinning it randomly produces combinations of great colors- text, background and border. You can select one or two of the colors while spinning for other suitable colors. As I am designing for a nursery, I will be selecting earthtones, brown, green, and tan; But I’ll brighten things a little with an appropriate purple. I’ll have floral images so I don’t want to get to many colors in the tables. Ahh yes, tables. Manipulating the tables was truly annoying. Chapter 9 in the MacDonald text, points out a diminished usage of “invisible tables”, shifting instead toward style-based layout. Style based layout requires CSS to position panels, columns and images on your site rather than clunky boxes. After all my efforts to get an invisible table layout, I think I’ll stick with this for now. I’ve gone through the CSS Kompozer tutorial but I’m not having much luck figuring it out. If my site were to be in excess of 5 0r 6 pages I would probably be a bit more determined to use a style sheet. But looking at the html source code for my site, it doesn’t seem necessary. It’s pretty basic and the tags are easy to follow and replicate for 5-6 pages. I’ll have to tackle the stylesheet on a later date. Contrary to the book, I’ve decided to use purple borders around my table cells. Most sites will eliminate borders if there are background colors. The purple lines just seem to add a needed accent for this kind of website.
Chapter 10 discusses the use of “frames”. Frames allow multiple webpages to appear at once in a browser window. When a pagelink is clicked the page will appear within a frame rather than the entire window. This is good for retaining navigation menus etc., instead of duplicating these features on every page. Unfortunately, this practice is not without error. Search Engines can find this confusing and it is not compatible to XHTML or useful in hand held computer based devices.
Chapter 3 in Beaird gets into texture. I considered a solid dark green background to all of my pages, but after reading this chapter I decided to use a dark green jasmine image as a background tile. The repeated tile is easier to download than one large image. This can be done in a stylesheet, but I’m only using on the homepage so I’ll just change the background to that single page in the HTML. The main point of using textures is to break up the two dimensional look a site can have and as Beaird points out, texture gives you a sense of feeling the page rather than simply simply looking at it.

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