First of all, I have to admit, my mom helped me with Dreamweaver so I could make my site all pretty and such. She designs internal sites for U of M nursing. We had a hard time getting the links to work, but eventually they worked, and everything else went pretty smoothly.

I used a separate header designed in an older program, Adobe Image Styler. The cool thing about Dreamweaver is that it allows you to design things in other programs and they transfer pretty easily to Dreamweaver.

I used a picture I took of myself (which actually ended up better than ones taken by others) using my new digital camera I got last Christmas. I couldn’t get the camera to work on the computers in our lab, so I used my roommate’s computer because I haven’t updated my computer to Windows 98 yet (I’m so far behind the times, I know). I used my mom’s Photoshop to resize it so it could fit neatly next to the text I was going to put in. I again transferred it to Dreamweaver.

Now that I look at the picture again, I’ve realized that my hair blends in with the top of the picture, so that probably was not the best choice of pictures, but maybe I’ll get another one in there later. Perhaps I’ll finally be able to take that group picture we’ve been talking about and use that one or something.

The text and links I put directly in Dreamweaver. As for what I wrote and my links, I fit the links into my paragraph about myself. I wanted to link to my current school and my high school and the town I grew up in, since those last two are fairly small, so I figured visitors might want to find out about where I grew up. I also included several of my interests, sports and The Simpsons. I want to incorporate a picture of Homer Simpson or the rest of his family, but I’m worried about copyrights.

I made sure to make my links easily understandable as to what they are. There’s nothing worse than a link that you don’t know why it’s there. I decided to keep the unvisited links blue because that’s the color they normally are and I don’t really see the point in making them anything other than that, unless the background is also blue, or black.

As of right now, I only have external links. As we get further along in this class, I hope to have internal links to things like my resumé, other class work, and whatever else might go in. At that time, I will worry about continuity, but at this time, that is not a concern.

I hope to eventually have a navigation bar, once I have more internal links and therefore more information to support the use of one. That way, visitors who have already seen the site may go directly to the page they want, and I can update my information on these other pages without affecting the main page much.

The type size I decided on, as recommended by mom, was (-1), which means one size less than the default size on someone’s computer. I did this because setting one particular size would be difficult since each person has a different default size for their browser. I wanted to make sure that the text would fit in the screen so that a user doesn’t have to scroll to the left to view the entire text.

I decided to go with the shade of green background that I did for several reasons. First, it’s one of EMU’s colors. When I started, I used a darker shade, but I realized that the text and the links would show up better on a lighter shade. The header is in white because it shows up well and because it is the other EMU color. I kept the text black because I figure that unless the background is really dark, why would anyone want to use anything other than black.

I decided not to use frames with my website. Several factors went into this decision. First, I don’t have enough information on my page to necessitate the use of frames. Second, I just don’t like having to scroll down another bar, personally, so I wouldn’t want one of my users to have to do the same thing.

My site has a lot of work still to come, but I believe for the purposes of where we are at this point in the class, I am right where I need to be. I look forward to learning more and creating an even better site in the future.