Planning (and building) the site...

So, after all the planning and cocking about, it was time to build a website - which turned out to be a lot more effort than it seemed. Even though I had everything planned out, if that plan needed changing even in the slightest it meant changing the same thing on every single page.

The biggest problem was the program - Dreamweaver. Because of the nature of the templates we were using, we were limited in how much we could change the layout of the site, as well as having to deal with all Dreamweaver's quirks. For example, when trying to remove the borders from buttons used as links, the box you need to check to show the borders is empty but the borders still show - you need to put a '0' in the box to get rid of them. Confusing? Yes. Annoying? Incredibly.

And then there's the problem of changing the colour of different aspects of the site - the background, the font, etc. I don't know how it happened, but at one point the page I was working on ended up looking like this:


Still, I persevered, and eventually things started to look a bit better:


After that, it was fairly plain sailing. Expect one last update soon....

Weeks 5 - 9: Experimenting with ideas

After weeks of research, we moved on to experimenting with ideas for the design of our websites. This largely involved using (read: messing around with) programs like Photoshop and Fireworks to create buttons and, more importantly, editing photos to make them more web-friendly (see the examples below).

Next we had our first (or maybe second, I can't quite remember) encounter with Dreamweaver. Using basic templates, and hastily-designed headers and buttons created with a rudimentary knowledge of PS and FW, I eventually managed to make a wesbite that looked like this.

Thankfully, my actual website looks better (and isn't written in Latin). It'll be finished and up on the Internets for all to see by Friday, but expect a few screenshots in the meantime, along with a couple of shots of what it's looked like at various stages of its development.