Minisite 3 Review

As I already said, minisite 3 was up. There are a couple of updates compared to minisite 2.

Navigation
Now users who browse minisite 3 will enjoy skimming through the interactive pop up boxes. When an user browses through the different categories, they will be given the option to quickly browse through all thumbnail images. Then if the user wants to view a particular image, then can click on the image to enlarge the image, then they will have to click either on the image or outside to close the large image to see all the smaller thumbnail images. This mutli-image gallery is all done in CSS.

In addition, more images have been uploaded now. This includes model photos, construction photos more concept sketches.

Site Design
The website now has a more clearer focus on the robotic theme. There are random micro text, some random abstract art to give the website a very futuristic, digital feel. An image of cylons from the popular tv show Battlestar galactica is also shown.
However I wanted white lines to boarder around the lower image, so I used tables in the html code such that the long cylon image doesn't look like it's just plonked there. The table also gives website some structure.

Opacity
When the user browses through the links, there will be transparencies. This gives the website a more sophisticaded depth. However there is a problem with this. It works fine in Mozilla Firefox, However there are some compatibility problems with internet explorer. For some reason, when you click to enlargen an image, the small thumbnails appear over on top of it as well. Strange...I had spent hours trying to fix it and I can't solve the problem. I may have to start from scratch to find out the problem.

Final Product Photos
The final product is finally documented in the form of photos. Some photos have different resolutions and this had created problems. Some photos are landscape and some photos are in portrait form. Since the thumbnail preview boxes are in landscape form, I also chose to display all the images in a landscape format. This required me to do some photo editing in photoshop so that the portrait photos' resolutions aren't warped.

Of course I could of portrait form sized versions of those thumbnail preview boxes, but I wanted all the thumbnail images to be of the same image format to keep the same consistency.

Minisite 2 Feedback

Yesterday, I got feedback from Justin for my minisite 2. There are 3 things I can improve on.

1) The presentation of images - The way images are placed on the page seems a bit too dull or barbaric..."like it's just plonked there". I should find a more aesthetic or interesting way to present these images. CSS play seems to have a good examples of how to just do that.

2) The navigation menu - This also needs some work on. Seems a bit plain... Needs to show some more interactivity.

3) The overall site design - Since I'm using a futuristic robotic-ish theme, I should focus on how I can use visual elements to represent that on my webpage.

Navigation Aesthetics : Star Bullet points

As mentioned previously before, I was considering how to increase the aesthetics of a navigation menu. At this stage, I'm going to use a image star to use as bullet points for menu items. I think it looks neat.

I made this star in illustrator. I also tried exporting it to photoshop and add a bevel and emboss effect. It looks pretty good, but when i tried that on the website, it looked weird because the star looked 3D and it didn't really suit the 2D-ness and colour theme of my website, so I reverted back to using the original orange star.

Minisite 2: Progression

I'm still working on my minisite 2. So far I had to re-learn CSS from scratch and it took forever...(echo-ing)

Yeah, but I must say, my tag muscle has beefed up and I'm glad I went through that hard training. Now I know how to use the "div id" tags in the html document in conjunction with the css file.

In my minisite 2 so far, I've got the header, main body background, text and the navigation menu. Soon I will put image documentation of my project to assiociate with those links. Here's how it looks so far (see above)

Users will be able to navigate through the website by hovering their mouse over the menu. I wanted to use this other way of creating a menu, but it was quite differcult at this stage, because it requires nested layers. Perhaps I will do that for minisite 3.

Even though the website looks simple, it took me like 4 days to set up all the images and links to work right. It required a lot of trial and error, because there was a lot of coding problems. For example, the menu would disappear into now where until I set the left and top location and position to be absolute.