During the course of the semester, we created a website which is meant to display the works of the students (blog page and design page) and their portfolio pieces for the field they want to go into. Through these assignments, we were meant to display our technical competence by making this website, and our theoretical competence through the completion of the blog posts.

My development of the site began with the wireframe assignment in which I got a rough idea of what I would like my site to look like aesthetically. Initially, I based my design on the National Geographic website because I believed that black, white and gold would have given me the most professional and sleek look, however, upon implementing this, I found that the site actually look cold and bleak. Hence, I changed the look of my site to look like the Jenifer Magazine’s site. Something I struggled with here was the CSS. It was often difficult to the exact look I wanted, and even then, it sometimes did not work at all and broke. To an extent, I do feel like my website is not as appealing as it could be, which has a negative influence on how users might experience it.

It is interesting to see and note how my website wireframes have changed. In the beginning, each page was very different from the other, but towards the end, the designs became very similar. I think this has a lot to do with the type of content on the site. Both the blog section and the design section are formatted the same way because both sections are text heavy and don’t really fit into the aesthetic of a timeline. Whereas the home page is a lot “freer” and does fit into the timeline narrative without having overwhelming text blocks.

I enjoy doing the HTML of the website the most, especially the semantic markup and the microformats, however, I feel like it would have been extremely satisfying to know if these tedious tasks made any difference to how much internet traffic my site gets. I feel that my site has done really well with it’s CSS and HTML overall, however, I also feel that my JavaScript pulled me down. As I explained in another post, I feel that JavaScript is much more difficult to work with because it is much more difficult to know what has gone wrong, and sometimes, it is difficult to know how to fix it. Additionally, I was unsure of what the JavaScript conventions were, and this reflected in my marks.

The main concern I have for my site, and how it developed, is accessibility. My site began as being fairly accessible, however, I feel like it has become progressively less so. As I explained in my UX/UI blog post and the JavaScript External Library post, my site is accessible in terms of formatting, however, it has some features in it which would prevent disabled people from fully interacting with the site. This aside, my site has had slight changes with its intentions. Initially, I wanted a sleek modern look, however, I started progressively wanting more homey and welcoming looks.