Fireworks GIF

A. The intent/purpose of this website is to provide my "uncle" an online presense for his "video game" store. His store has games, consoles, and various accessories. I started the design process with basically just imagining what my "uncle" would want to see on his site. I also have the class requirements as a check list so that as I'm going through my design process I'm making sure to include all of the elements required such as forms, tables,...etc. From here I laid out my plans for what pages I wanted to develope and then a general overall scheme of how the pages would look. I knew that this being my first webpage I wanted to keep them all similar in nature to their basic structure & logo at the top of each page and then vary the content on each page along with some other extras. After my initial layout was complete (header/logo in place, body with div sections the way I wanted them, and footer) and started adding in the required elements (table, form, multimedia). Once this was done I researched how to hide a part of a webpage and then enabled a piece of the page to be unhidden after submitting data to be on a "text" or "email" list. So after my first pass and critiquing from my professor and peers I rearranged a lot of my site. My overall layout (navigation tab and color scheme were a bit out of the norm) to I took their suggestions into consideration and adjusted my nav setup, color scheme, and overall layout a little. I feel I need a lot more practice to be able to wrap my brain around the creativity side of building a website. I think my site is definitely functional and I've tested is in both Firefox and Explorer and everything works correctly, but I definitely can see much more potential for it given more time.

B. My design choice(s) fell in line with that of patriotism, USA USA USA :). I felt that it would be easy to use red,white, and blue as the color scheme and could incorporate some .gif files of fireworks. Starting off I'm setting my background to red on all pages, I think normally this wouldn't be a great choice vs. doing a solid white background, but since I'm going to have the body of each page covering pretty much the entire visibable page it provides a nice red border. I'm still adusting font sizes as the more I build into the site the more I realize that I need to make the font smaller so that the page isn't 5 miles long. One this I will keep though is my navigation fonts I think having them larger brings attention to them and makes it pretty simple for the end user to figure out and use. I also need to work on my pictures and do a better job of scanning and cropping before uploading them. I have a class setup so that it will keep all of the pics the same size, but this has caused some distortion in some of them (work in progress :) ).
17 06-25 I left my original post from week 6 above to compare against where I ended up. After going through the critiques from my professor and peers I definitely felt like my initial plans were a little overboard (entire background was red, logo lot of red in it, nav text and some other text blue, multiple .gif moving pics running). My nav page was in row form over in the top right of each page. So after getting my pointers from everyone and then going out and really taking a look at what is out there on the web (not just opening a page and looking at the pictures, but really seeing how things are put together with the html editor (F12 on Firefox) I realized that I really needed to tone down my website. I moved my nav section to a centered horizontal row, my back ground is a light grey. I but some color in on the header and coupon sections but it is not overwhelming like the RED!!!! that was everywhere before. I also left only one moving .gif file on each page. It is much easier to look at now! I do not profess to be a master web builder by anymeans and still feel I need some kind of creative miracle to happen for me to take it to the next level, but I'm much happier with my first crack at this then I was after week 6's attempt.

C. Currently this website is just a "read only" version of what it could be. Given the time and resources it would be turned into a full on store. Each product could be loaded to the web via some kind of database scripting instead of manually having to alter each individual page everytime product changes. Each producted would be tied to a purchasing system (Cart) and the site could accept payments with credit card/paypal...etc. I would make the pages that displayed contact more about the visual picture of the product and then have a separate window or pop window that game the full details of each product (think Gamestop, BestBuy, or Walmart...any online retailer). Also my webpage allows the user to enter their information to be included in an email or text distribution, currently this does nothing, but given more time/resources this would be tied to a database that actually checked against and/or stored the information entered from the user. To expand upon this as well, user accounts could be created so that the user could return to the site and login to show purchase history or maybe even be part of an awards program. So many more things could be done with time/resources.