The first major decision I made in designing my website was choosing a topic. I honestly had no idea what subject I could possibly build a website on, since I really had no desire to make a website. I spontaneously decided to make a website about Prince’s new EXO3 racquet technology and the racquets that use it, since in helping my friend choose a new racquet, I came across these racquets and was interested. I didn’t have a better idea, so I decided to have my site feature these racquets.

After choosing my topic, I then had to worry about how I was actually going to go about making this website. I knew absolutely no code, and I was a bit worried about attempting to learn it for an online class. I tried using Dreamweaver at first, and it did help me obtain a better understanding of HTML, especially with images and links; however, I soon ditched Dreamweaver deciding I preferred coding everything myself, since I felt like this gave me more control.

While I found HTML to be pretty straight forward, I had a few issues with CSS at first. Without the CSS, my website looked terrible. It had no structure, and the text stretched across the whole screen. I knew I had to change this, so I continued to work on understanding CSS. My main problem was that I couldn’t see how CSS and HTML related to each other. I have to see things in order to learn and understand them, and once I was able to see Professor Collier’s CSS for his kitties website next to his source code, it all made sense. I was then able to make my own CSS page and reference it in my HTML. This gave my page some structure and color, making it look much more organized and professional.

Understanding CSS allowed me to move on to page design. I decided to make my background color complementary to the majority of my pictures. The pictures contained a lot of teal, so I made this my background color. I also made some design elements myself using InDesign and Photoshop. Some of these worked, and some did not. Having once been a layout designer for a print publication, I wanted to use some of my InDesign skills; however, most of these attempts did not look good, which was hard to accept since I had spent so much time designing them. Some successful InDesign products were the buttons I designed to use at the tops of pages to link them back to the homepage and racquets section. Unfortunately, my most time consuming InDesign endeavor failed though. I tried to create infoboxes for racquet stats in InDesign, then copy them into Photoshop, save them as JPEGs, and upload them to my filebox. This method sacrificed too much image clarity, and I eventually took these off my website in favor of a bulleted list. Though I lost some color and the neat little box, this made the information a bit easier to read and also put the information closer to other racquet facts in each racquet profile page. It also made my racquet profile pages less cluttered.

Overall, learning to design for the web has taught me to be more direct and simple in my online communications. People will probably ignore half or more of my site’s content, so I might as well accept that fact and make it easier for them to find what they’re looking for.