Testing

Hello

A big sigh of relief!

Ahhh, I'm finally done with the semester and can enjoy the rest of the summer!

After some frustrations with blogger not working, and running into ftp problems today, my site it finally posted at:
http://members.cox.net/vegasdog1/preservation

all my other assignments are posted here:
http://members.cox.net/vegasdog1/hist697/type
http://members.cox.net/vegasdog1/hist697
http://members.cox.net/vegasdog1/hist697/image

It is quite amusing to go back and look at my earlier attempts at design and see how much I have progressed over just a semester. If web work wasn't so frustrating, I'd do more of it. Hopefully over the summer I will complete a homepage for myself that will have a vitae on it so when I get my degree I can imediately start job hunting!

Website continued

I'm experimenting with three different fonts, and I'm having trouble deciding which to use. I've definitely settled on the penmanship font for the navigation bar. I'm indecisive about the font for the headings. There's two, one called technical, which is what is now posted on the homepage, and there's one called antique type that's posted at:
http://members.cox.net/vegasdog1/preservation/indexant

I'm also still working on my restoration "gallery." It's much improved, but not where I want it yet. It's getting there.

Preliminary final website

Is the title an oxymoron or what?
I've posted a draft of the site at:
http://members.cox.net/vegasdog1/preservation/
It is still a work in progress. I envisioned the "restoration" page to be a gallery of projects, but I am having lots of problems placing the photos exactly where I want them and making everything look nice on the page. So far, this is my best attempt.
I'm still searching for the perfect font for the large headings. The blueprint type font I chose looks great for small things such as the footer, but I think it does lose something when it gets bigger.
Still working...

myst

I really liked the first Myst, but the versions since then have become impossible to solve. I don't understand how anyone could ever solve this without cheating. It's strong points remain, however. And that's experiential quality and beautiful graphics. It's very engrossing. Probably the closest history site I've seen come close to this is The Lost Museum, which has the same great graphics and the feeling of exploring a world. But how to use this for anything I'd be capable of designing, I don't know

Urrggh!

The last couple of weeks have been extremely crazy, and with work and personal life, it has been very difficult to keep up with school. I have managed to put something together, which hopefully is not too bad!

To save money, I have switched from Verizon to Cox, and after going through some hair pulling to get the Cox ftp service up and running, my assignment now resides at:
http://members.cox.net/vegasdog1/preservation/

My content is not done, so I'll have everything greeked in. I did however find what I think is a pretty cool font that looks like the archtectural blueprint font at:
http://www.pbs.org/flw/index.html
But this font was free, unlike any of the fonts that I have found that were even remotely like anything I was looking for. And for someone on a students budget who depends on student loans to pay my mortgage, free is great! The site, Fonts for Kids, where I got this font has some great knock offs of some of the expensive fonts that we have looked at in class: http://www.momscorner4kids.com/fonts/

Don't Make Me Think

This is a great book w/ lots of useful info. Things he pointed out were common sense stuff, but of course, this common sense stuff is sometimes the hardest thing to design, like using "jobs" instead of "employment opportunities." The examples of actual websites were useful. I wonder how many of those sites underwent redesign after his criticisms.

One great point he makes is not ot overload pages with text. As historians, who are wedded to text, I think this would be the hardest part of his suggestions to implement. We are naturally verbose creatures. I myself tend to be a very succinct writer, so I hopefully will not break this rule too badly. Which leads me to my next topic...

Since we are historians and are so into the written word, if we do feel the need to create something very wordy for our sites, what is the best way to do it? Some of the projects in class, such as an online archive, could probably get away with not being too verbal, but what about those of us who are have to create some kind of argument? If my website on preservation in Richmond is going to be more than an online exhibition, and I am creating an argument (although what I am arguing other than preservation is a great tool for grassroots-oriented community revitalization that preserves history, I don't know at this point), how do I argue something without being verbal? If I feel the need to be verbal, would it be better to creat a pdf document that could be printed rather than a webpage?

Cool websites

It took me a while to find a great website. Second Story had some well-designed sites that I really liked, but none of them really had anything to do with architecture. I loved the Lewis and Clark site, but it had nothing to do with architecture. But I liked the way it was organized into three parts, which I see my site in three parts; history, preservation efforts, and photo gallery. It had sounds, interactive maps, exhibit gallery, video clips of Native Americans, and it presented the story from multiple view points. All of these were great features.

There was one site on css Zen Garden called Urban that came closer to something I could envision. I like how it used architectural features for the border on the left that served as the navigation bar, and it had a picture of buildings as the footer to the page. I could do something similar to this and get a real look and feel for an architectural district.

Another site I came across which I also could emmulate, PBS's site for a Ken Burns film about Frank Lloyd Wright. This website used Frank Lloyd Wright architectural features as the overall background for the pages (the wrapper) and then each subsection had a different background color and some kind of Wright-styled architecutral feature on the left. Although each sebsection was a different color, all the colors worked with FLW styling, and the architectural images on the left kept all the sections together. It has a nice introduction page with an image that draws you in. There's a well-designed menu on the bottom of the page that keeps with the theme in design, although it's a wierd place for a menu to be. Of all the websites I visited, this is probably the best example that I've seen so far of something I would want to emulate that would be within the realm of possibilities for me to create. It's not so far advanced in design like most of the Second Story or Terra Incognita sites that I wouldn't feel overwhelmed trying to do something like this.