final thoughts

I am pleased with the progress that i have made using html, I am now confident in creating a webpage and understanding html coding.  i can now read coding and know alot of what it means.  It is no longer a "foreign" language to me.  i would feel quite happy now creating a website now from html.  i have learnt the bulk of my knowledge from html tutorials online, i found these helpful as i searched for the solution to a problem i had when i encountered it.  for example when we wanted to have music playing in the background for our site we searched for this on goole and found the solution to our problem and learnt about embeding videos and audio into a website using html.  

i feel like i have done a complete turn around form being a complete beginner to html i have at least become intermediate at creating html. The reason for not being a pro at the end of the project? html is incredibly anal, with having everything perfect for links to work, pictures to appear, music to play, things to underline etc etc.  It is a massive subject and couldnt be mastered even in the huge time we had for the project. i am excited about our final website as i think it looks the really good and has come such a long way since the very beginning of the idea of using trains as a basis of our design.  My favourite part of the website is the iframes and the drop down menus.  These things look very simple but are quite complicated, especialy the drop down menus.  These things make the website the way it is, an interactive site that i think is very readable and hopefuly enjoyable to viewers of the internet-human-body.com.

Adding something special to the website

We felt that after phil saying that our websites need to be more than just images and text that we should experiment with background sounds on our pages.  i think that this is a good idea.  we have added in the coding for the sound on the website and it works a treat here is the coding.


<embed src="Tainsound.mp3" autostart="true" loop="true" hidden="true" volume="50%"></embed>


We have set the volume to 50% because we didn't want to overpower the viewer with the sound. We are also going to put a sound loop on our homepage, of a tannoy that welcomes the viewer to the website.

TBALES?!

Here is me trying to create our website in tables in html as you can see tables are usually used for very simply designed websites like facebook where everything is, well in tables or blocks.  For our website we wanted it to look different and to achieve that we needed to use div tags to place everything in the right place correctly and know that it was always going to stay in that place.  The use of iframes aswell to fill the box in the middle was key as it adds like the title suggests an interactive edge to the design.  We are going to keep to using the the coding we have already, as like i explained it is key to our website design.

TROUBLE?

So georgia, one of the group members, had a problem that none of us could solve so she went to pete for some help with it, he looked at our coding and said that it was far too complicated, which is annoying as we have all spent so long inputing into this website and to be told that we were going to potentially have to start again was devastating especially as we only had like two days until the presentation!

Pete suggested that we used tables instead of div tags that place the things we needed in exactly where we wanted. We had a workshop lesson on tables when we had the html workshops with pete so i shall digg up the notes for that and see if it is plausible doing it again. Petes argument was that it was that it was easier and the simpler the html the better.

Welcome video

Here is the welcome video, i am pleased with how it has turned out, we felt that we wanted a light hearted feel to welcome viewers to the homepage.  We gave it a feel of an old public information film with the use of diagrams, and an old film effect.  I also voiced the video, which was a bit embarrassing but it made the video, the right sounding voice with the right graphic has made it look authentic i think.  This will sit on top of our homepage and will be set to auto play in the html when the viewer goes onto the site.  This was a rather good bit of coding we found that allowed the video to be played automatically.


embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5Rjg2qVPRok?hl=en&fs=1&autoplay=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="340" height="230"></embed></div

highlighted in green is the little add on you add for it to autoplay.

Drop Down menu DRAAAMMMMA!

We have had the decision for a long time to make on the page navigation, whehter to have all links to all pages on the side at all times or make the viewer go back to the homepage to then prgressivly go to each page.  I think we have decided as a group to go for a drop down menu on the side for each part fo the spine.  This is a good idea but incredibly hard to achieve.  From searches online the only ones i can find are very simple menus or incredibly over complex ones that can only be achived through something like dreamweaver which of course we are not allowed to use.  i will continue to see if i can find a tutroial on how to create a drop down menu or if there is a way to edit the drop down menu i have found to make it more attractive looking, please see the example image on the cervical link on the left.

Crimple Crumple

We as a group decided that the tiles had to go and we had to change up the design slightly to make it look even better, which are what peer review sessions are there for.  i have attached the new design on here, we have also added a crumpled effect onto the pages with a slight "dirty gradient".  This is because we are trying to reproduce the old london undergound poster.  The london undergeound is famous for its big posters, advertising all through out history and we felt reproducing this effect will add even more connotations of the london underground and more importantly trains.  You can see the dramatic enhancedment of the page already without the paper texture.  But with the paper texture it looks even better. You can also see the homepage that we have done the effect to aswell. I think this will make the website more visually interesting and less boring for viewers.