This repository contains classwork for the DMA 1460 class at Hamline University. My goals for this course are to refine my design skills. I've worked with HTML, CSS, and JS in the past, but I have never taken any design course. Of course having all of the information on the webpage in an organized way is important, but it must also be layed out attractively to engage viewers.
So far in this course I have learned and worked with a lot more html than I ever did before. I have learned a lot more about css styling, and the new elements that came out in HTML 5. Besides that I have been learning a lot about best HTML practices which I missed while teaching myself HTML. At some point soon I will try to redo my personal blog in order to update it with the knowledge I've learned.
Feel free to check out my webpage at dma.hamline.edu/~dmares01. Any updates I make should be posted to the server within 48 hours. Please feel free to email me with critiques or ideas at dmares01@hamline.edu. The whole point of this class is to learn and refine my skills so I will gladly take any and all feedback.
This project was the first project I did for the DMA class. It was initially made to work with relative linking, and having multiple html pages instead of just a single page as I've done in the past. Having never used relative linking or having a place on a server to store files, I never realized how useful it could be. Having things split up into multiple pages vastly decreases load times, especially when the user may not need all of the information anyways. In the past I would just use javascript to hide elements not being used until the user clicked, indicating they wanted to view the information. While this then appears faster for the user as it is already loaded. It has a great impact on that initial load time.
For this project we had to take a poem we enjoyed and divide it out by lines over multiple webpages. We tried to expand the meaning of the poem by using various images in the background. These visuals were meant to add some depth to the poem, or mayb e lead the user to interpret it in a different way. There were a view different ways to implement this. Due to my background I focused very heavily on the UI and didn't put as much focus onto the images or text as I should have.
I took the course to work on my design skills, yet I had pretty much ignored the design aspect of the project. So in hindsight I learned my lesson and tried to change that moving forward. Fortunately because of this project I was able to learn a lot about relative links, how to have a site divided into multiple pages, as well as more practice uploading things to a server. Moving forward I would like to set up my own server, and get a domain name as well. I have a domain name now but I am having trouble trying to get it to link to the webpage I have set up.