The intent of this website is to demonstrate the various ways to construct different pages to present the user with different user interface options and provide a service of showing off interesting art peices while also providing lots of exposure to both famous and up and coming artists. This test website exists to show there is a gap in the market that can be filled with a little bit of thinking and innovation. Through the simplistic design of this website artists can sign up to be in upcoming shows of various themes, and enthusiests alike can even purchase peices they fancy.
There were many steps that I took into creating the website that ensured I met the objectives I set for myself and the ovjectives for this assignment.
Once I came up with my general css classes, it became much easier to construct the different pages from scratch. These classes help me make my base template for each page, which makes it much easier to keep everything looking clean and consistent.
There were many other hurdles I had to overcome, but researching different methods online really helped and made a huge difference in making sure my development process went more smoothly.
Learning about the 'table' display type was a huge step forward into making everything on my pages have a perfect 'centered' feel. The 'wrapper' class I had created helps make sure that the footer is placed pefectly at the bottom of the page.
Some CSS code I found during my research helped me put together the 'Shop' page, which is inteded to allow art enthusiests to buy what the local or national artists have registered to put up for sale. These items can hold an image and description, and when clicked will bring up a full blown version of the image, which is more often than not a preview of the artwork itself.
Coming up with a solid dark them was one of the most fun parts of designing this entire website. The light color standard that most web pages uses today can be hard on the eyes, especially during the later hours of the afternoon and evening. The trim color I decided to use was built into CSS called: darkslateblue, and is a nice blend between blue and purple.
Designing the custom buttons was another challenge I ran into, as I did not want to use the standard buttons. After doing a little digging online, though, it turned out to be much easier than I thought to make a custom button layout to server my needs for this site. These buttons on the index page can be used to effectively take the user to the different pages of the site with ease while looking and behaving much better than the standard HTML buttons will provide.
I really wanted to make sure the footer was always positioned at the bottom of the page, regardless of how much data was actually occupying the page, which was a challenge. Using a combination of a few different CSS techniques on a few different classes I learned during this course, I was able to make that possible.
The very clean and sleek design makes this site very simple and easy to use, while also providing a very professional experience to each user, whether they are an artist, an art enthusiest, or just interested in art themselves.
In the future, this website could be able to support many more features. Users could be able to login to a profile tailored to thier preferences to provide them a more personal and unique experience. These profiles could also track transaction history, and event histroy. This could include the events that the user has been to as well as the events the user has 'appeared' in. More appearances could grant some kind of more exclusive status, which could then grant that user some kind of priveleges to get into events early.
Signing up for notices should not be restricted to people who sign up for events. While at first this might be a good idea, it would make much more sense to open this up at the user level so anyone can be notified for upcoming events via email or text SMS.