Chapter 3 Hands-On Exercises (1-9)

In this unit, I learned more about cascading stylesheets, IDs, classes, and external stylesheets and had the opportunity to practice using them. So, here you go...

This sentence is using an inline style

Testing the new embedded body settings (Green text on a white background)(NOTE: the background color here is changed due to settings on this site)

Testing the .new class settings (Bold and italic, Arial/Helvetica/sans-serif font family, no underlined links, white background, black text): Yahoo.com

Week 2 Exercises Involving External Stylesheets

My Favorite Movie Using External Stylesheet #1(3.7)

My Favorite Movie Using External Stylesheet #2(3.7)

CSS Advantages Using External Stylesheet

CSS Advantages Using Modified External Stylesheet and Using Inline Code to Overwrite Stylesheet Elements

CSS Disadvantages Using External Stylesheet

CSS Disadvantages Using Modified External Stylesheet

3.9 Required me to go to CSS Validator to validate one of my external stylesheet files. The site was surprisingly easy to use. I uploaded the file and clicked the CHECK button and it popped up right away with two error messages. I had listed the font name and the color for my <h1> definition incorectly. Not only did it recognize my crass mistakes, it even told me how to fix them. I quickly made the changes and uploaded the file again and it passed. Easy peasy. I'd recommend this tool to anyone learning about CSS and XHTML. It definitely made things a lot easier for me. It's a very useful tool if you're not completely sure what you're doing(ie. - if you're like me =D ).

Chapter 2 Hands On Exercises

DAVID

Yahoo.com

• Sunday
• Monday
• Tuesday
• Wednesday
• Thursday
• Friday
• Saturday

1. HTML
2. XML
3. XHTML

MARK TWAIN

"The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

A diagram of the organization of a web site is called a site map or storyboard. Creating the site map is one of the initial steps in developing a web site.

The additional exercises required me to create several websites and they can be found here:

• My Favorite Movie (2.7)
• Three Networking Protocols (2.8)
• They Might be Giants (2.9)
• Tiramisu Recipe (2.10)

My First Entry

So, here I am in my 8th quarter at ITT and I am taking a Scripting and Web Authoring course. My first assignment is to create a blog about my experiences learning Adobe Dreamweaver and XHTML. Ideally, this plain, boring looking blog should become neater and neater as the quarter moves on. As of right now, though, I know virtually zero about designing web pages.

I do, however, know what looks good and what doesn't. For instance: Google.com is an example of a web site that looks good. I like the minimalist nature of the site. The front page is very simple and straightforward. Google is a search engine and doesn't pretend to be anything else.

As for an example of a poorly designed website, I present this example to you that was co-created by one of my instructors and a friend of his:  AFCatering.com

At first glance, the site doesn't look too bad. They grabbed a bunch of components and threw them together into a solid package that delivers everything the client wanted. However, if you take a look at the order forms, it gets atrocious. The pages seem to scroll down forever. This functionality could have been better done by breaking it into smaller segments. For instance, the menu deserves its own page. Each menu item could have had a box next to it where the customer could enter the quantity they wanted to order. In the upper right hand corner of the screen could have been a box that would track the total based upon what the customer had entered in with a check out button that would take them to a payment options screen.

I hope to not make these same mistakes during the assignments I undertake for this course. That is all for now.