We had a blended class today, and our teacher talked to us about Criterion I a bit. We were instructed on how to find information on our software, and about our computer. I also had a little bit of time to work with the program I plan to use, Dreamweaver, during class. I tried to find out some of the program's capabilities.
After much contemplation, I decided to download the free trial version of Dreamweaver (I can now use the software for free for the next 30 days). Still unsure of how exactly I wanted to format my site, I decided I would attempt to fiddle around with the formatting and tools available to me. After about an hour of such fiddling, I was able to figure out the basic workings of the program. In the formal lesson, we talked about making tables and links and such. Today, I went a little deeper. I discovered it was possible to make a table within a table, and how to do things like change the cellpadding and the size of the cell border. It was good for me to mess around with these HTML elements, because it reminded me of the coding that I had learned a couple years ago. I edited the page in "split" mode: I could either look at the GUI, or the coding. When I didn't know how to edit a certain thing in one mode, I could use the other.
I also figured out how to implement CSS (cascading style sheet) elements which would apply to the entire page, and, if I attached a CSS sheet to my sites, would apply to all of the pages on my site. As seen below, there are certain tools for adding CSS.
I found out that certain things, such as font size, color, and background color, could be written into a CSS rule, which would then be applied to whatever I labeled as such.
In my practice, I created a rule called "hopethisworks" in which I tried to change the color of certain cells of my table, and the font color.
I also tried to use the program to work out a general idea of the color scheme I wanted. After experimenting with colors, I decided on a simple white and dark green scheme, using our school colors.
I don't want this website to be too complicated and confusing- too many buttons and flashing lights are distracting, and it would take too much time for me to learn how to implement all of those tools. I do, however, want a certain level of complexity. I want this to be an extensive resource, which will require a lot of pages.
