Website PPRD

I found Dreamweaver extremely difficult to learn as it was different to any other program I had used before.  The site I had designed only needed Dreamweaver in order to make it so I did not need to use Flash or Lightbox which kept things much more simple for me.  I used Photoshop initially, making use of the slice tool to keep proportions exact.

Researching into many different artists' websites and looking into what makes good web design allowed me to realise what worked well and what did not in terms of website design.

I was aware that the navigation needed to be very simple and easy to use as it could be extremely frustrating having to go through several levels to view what you wanted or to be unable to find a certain page. I overcame this problem by having my menu clearly on the left of my site.

As well as a contact page I put my e-mail address in the top right hand corner to make it easily accessible.

With the Illustration page, and Photography I had too may images to fit comfortably on one page so I made two pages and split the thumbnails between them.  This way the page does not look too cluttered.

I took a while to decide what to use as my website header as I wanted to create a brand that represented myself.  I used an image of flowers partially obscuring my name; this works well with the images on my site as they are in a similar ink and line drawn style.  The splash of yellow ink adds some colour to the otherwise grey, black and white site.  This was a conscious decision as I wanted to keep my site simple with very little colour in order to make my images stand out.

I faced problems when I had not used my CSS page effectively, so many images were duplicated on each page and my buttons often jumped around out of place.  Fortunately I became aware of this very early on so it was not a big issue to make these changes and definitely benefited the consistency of my site.

Once I had finished with the designs and using the 'Swap Image' function in Behaviours to display my images I was able to adjust certain features which could be better.  I began by changing the size of my buttons as they were slightly too big, I did not change the size drastically as I did not want too much open space but I am much happier with their size now.  I also changed my 'Contact' page, adding in a contact form which looks much more professional and is far more convenient for anyone visiting the page.  I attempted re-designing the Facebook and Twitter buttons, however their design and colour actually seemed to fit better with my page rather than making them unnecessarily different.

I am really pleased with my page and when I compare it to my initial designs it is exactly how I had planned, apart from a few changes which it became apparent needed to be made.  I also feel much more confident on Dreamweaver and would not be afraid to use it again in the future.