HTML/XHTML/CSS Final Project from August 2010
August 2010 — I took the HTML/XHTML/CSS class after I took the Dreamweaver class. The Dreamweaver class focused on design view over code view, which made the concept of CSS and positioning confusing at the time. I was learning backwards. It was like picking up a foreign phrasebook without knowing how the tenses, sentence structure, and subject/verb agreement worked. In the XHTML class, I learned that you could have a lot more control over the site if you spoke the language in parts instead of the preassigned sentences.
I decided to do an informational music site based off of my music. In terms of content creation, being a musician is a gold mine. There was a list of lyrics, an image gallery, an image map for navigation, and a simple contact form (meaning no validation or processing). This project came about pretty naturally and drove me to learn Photoshop. I have the student edition of Adobe's Creative Suite 4 Web Premium ® and used it to add text graphics and to color backgrounds of images to match the theme of the site. I learned layers, coloring, and basic text manipulation by warping Rosewood Standard. The code itself covers the basics of HTML/XHTML/CSS with the use of images, absolute and relative links, image links, image maps, ordered lists, applying styles, and using different form elements.
I don't have too many regrets on this project, but I am a little disappointed at the content of the class. I learned CSS mostly after this class when I was working through Javascript and PHP and my own projects. If I knew then what I know now, I would have added more interactivity, positioning, and would have avoided inline style in favor of an external style sheet.
