Component 1: One of the most important things my client wanted to include in his side was a certain steampunk aspect, which he felt represented his style in design and animation. This did create some difficulties though, as it was difficult to get metal and parchments to flow well together. One of the more important elements that we both wanted to keep was the navigation and graphics at the top, since we felt it was the way steampunk should look. I had to make some compromises though with the design to make it contrast and flow correctly though, so I got rid of the original idea of having a certain color parchment for the background and another for where the content would go. After showing this comp to my client, he still felt that some steampunk elements were needed. One comment was that there should be some kind of metal separating the header and footer from the main content. Another thing was that he felt there should be some vertical separation by adding a leather texture to the sides, which with was more the plan besides the horizontal separation. There are also plans to make a few more tweaks as well, just to make the website look a little less bland.
Component2: I actually already used CSS to set up my site. The way I did it was divide it into 3 main containers: the first being the header, next being the main content, and lastly the footer of the page. I did this using all div tags. After seperating the site into three different containers, I used more div tags to further divide them up for specific content, like the graphics for the navigation or the two different columns for the main content. One of the first problems I had was getting the footer, or more specifcally its background, to stay at the bottom of the page. I ended up using an absolute positioning of the particular div tag, but it causes the footer to be at the bottom of the viewing window no matter what, which I will have to fix. Another problem that I did forsee, and was able to fix, is the different ways Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer interpret margins. This really became apartment when positioning the heading text in the banner. I fixed this using a particular div that only Internet Explorer could see and writing its own set of rules for that.
Component 3: I think I’m going to use a template for the site with maybe a couple of library items. I’m focusing more on templates because for the most part, the entire site will be the same except for the way the main body content is set up. The page with the most difference will probably be the homepage, since it has a two column set up going, while the other pages’ content will be me a more centered, single column type of content. However, I do see some problems with the div tags (as I’m kind of pessimistic when it comes to that sort of thing) and that I’ll probably have to create specific tags for each different site. Also, with the way the footer is set up now, it may cover up some content since some of the other sites will be longer than the home site. Another problem I see is that the strict way Adobe Dreamweaver keeps templates could cause some problems if I need to move something a certain way, or make it larger or smaller, since I had some of those problems when doing the exercises with templates.
Component 4: I don’t really see myself using automated tasks a whole lot for this website. One of the few places I can see doing this will be when I’m setting up the thumbnails for my client’s art gallery, since that will be putting the same sized picture with the same settings over and over again. However, the rest of the site doesn’t really have too many repetitive tasks that are involved with it, due to the variedness of all the pages. Their content will be too different, since one page will be a resume, one will be contact information, and the other page with text will be a small “About Me” page. Some of the text in the explanations of the art, like how it was made, what inspired it, etc. could be be automated so that the picture appears to the left while the text of it appears to the right, all with the same formatting. However, since a lot of the formatting will be already done using the templates of the site, automating it won’t be of much use for me.
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