I finished the web design for The Carter Building Alliance and got it on line for review! Creating the website was a challenge that was very rewarding but getting it online was a nightmare! My web hosting service provider charged a lot for domain names so I bought them through Only Domains.com, $25 for 3 years. My service provider walked me through the process of setting up sub-directories and uploading and I thought, connecting my domain name with the site. The instructions said to give the internet 24-48 hours to complete the location process; so I did. After 48 hours, I was beginning to have my doubts so I called them back. They left out a very important part! I needed to go to the domain site and tell the domain names where to find the sites I’d posted! I received a lot of help from both ends and viola!…the site was online within minutes. So many things to learn…so many things.
I have looked into classes for web design and certification; they cost a small fortune that I don’t have right now. Each class costs almost as much as a semester long course at the university and they only last 2 days! I have done a lot of studying on my own, I know the basics, and the courses don’t seem to cover much more. Yes, I picked up a few interesting tidbits in the HTML class I just took but I don’t think they were worth $600 (the textbook was only $75). Anyway, I decided that a more effective way to go about this was to volunteer to create a few websites and learn by doing. Each step of the way has been challenging and rewarding. I spent several days trying to find out how to set up a table where you could click on a thumbnail in one cell and have the full image show up in another cell. Websites do it all the time. I went through all the Table of Contents and Indexes in my Dreamweaver books, searched online through all the forums, and even printed the source code from sites that did this. Everything pointed to javascript which was then imported into Dreamweaver. I know a little about javascript but not enough; I found a javascript class that taught this exact bit of programming in the 3rd lesson, just $250! My HTML instructor confirmed that I could do what I wanted directly in Dreamweaver using remote targets but she wouldn’t tell me how until the end of a $600 course 6 weeks in the future. I needed to know now. Back to the bookstore….I found Dreamweaver The Missing Manuel; it is set up a bit different from the other books I have and I found it right away. Dreamweaver has a ‘behavior’ called Swap Images! Now that I know what it’s called, I can find it in most of my books and I can’t even remember the search terms I was using before.
Yesterday I began working on the website for a conference next summer in Washington State. I have been trying to get people that live out there to send me photographs to use in the website. Nothing. I’ve searched websites about the area and not found what I wanted and I had tried a few stock photo sites that were supposed to have free images, never found free… Yesterday I went back to a Google image search and found many good images and stumbled on Fotolia, a stock agency that sells use of online images for .75 an image. I found plenty of images that I can use and they let you download low resolution images to try different layouts. For less than $10, I’ll have what I need. Now I just wait anxiously for the go ahead from the committee….
Building websites and learning the programming is addictive. I haven’t worked on my art all month, next month I’ll need to work on balancing the 2.
Today I need to clean off my desk and start working on a map for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation annual fundraising walk. Another new experience, another portfolio piece, and hopefully a bit of good networking!
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