To do:

There’s much that needs to be done for this website during the remainder of the term. I’m well on my way to having the colors picked out, but after that I need to work on:

Resizing the photographs I’m going to use (both in thumbnails and full size versions)
Writing text to go along with the photos
Selecting links for my annotated links page
Deciding on a title for the website
Putting it all together

I think I’ll have enough to keep me busy!

Color shortlist

I went back and looked at the colors I’d pulled out of the Color Schemer website, and I have some preliminary color choices:

#C8D2DF – light blue
#538D54 – darker green
#8D7153 – brown
#7892B1 – slate blue. This is the original color I pulled out of one of my photographs.
#DFD5C8 – light beige (although I may need to go lighter)

I’m looking forward to punching these into the style sheet tomorrow in class and seeing what kind of “feel” they create in the website. It may not be a winner right off the bat, but I should gain a sense of if I need to go lighter, darker, cooler, etc.

Busy Busy!

So the last few days have been quite busy, and I haven't gotten much done on my website. I was a bridesmaid in a friend's wedding, which was a blast, but rather time consuming and exhausting and not so good for getting homework done.

I did make a start at picking out colors for my website. I opened up a few Alaska pictures and used the eye dropper tool to pick out a color from the picture. Then I double-clicked on the colored box that showed up on the left of the screen, and that gave me the hex number/value for the color. Then my amazing husband who does this kind of stuff for a living said, "Hey, now that you have the hex value, you can punch it into the Color Schemer website and get matching colors with their hex values." It's very cool! The website is

http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html. It's been really helpful so far, as I've been able to find both the cool blue colors as well as some deeper greens that I've been looking for. (Although, the Color Schemer does give you a billion choice, which means you could spend hours looking for that exactly perfect color....). I'm sure it will take some experimenting to choose the exact hues I want, but at least I have a starting place now.

First Cut Photos

Tonight I looked through my Alaska photos, which was really fun! It’s been a while since I’d seen them. I did a first round of choosing photographs for my Alaska website: 4 pictures for Skagway, 4 for Juneau, 4 for Ketchikan, and 4 for glaciers. I thought 4 might be a good number because I wanted all of the thumbnails to be visible on the web pages without a lot of scrolling. For the towns, I tried to choose a mix of pictures that would give a rounded view of the place: it is absolutely gorgeous on the one hand, but on the other hand, you have a strange conglomeration of old things and new things and a lot of tourist buses to boot :) Alaska is definitely a unique area.

Looking over the pictures, my idea for a color scheme was both confirmed and challenged. I had been expecting to use cool colors for my website, and the pictures did show a lot of slate blues and gray tones that were in keeping with my idea. However, I was surprised to see a lot of really lush greens in vegetation, and some really bright blues in the sky and water as well. I may try to pick up on some of these more vibrant colors for contrast, which was an issue that I had been wondering about earlier.

Another thing that stood out to me from these photographs was how often reflections showed up in water. I’m not sure if there’s any way I can pick up on that in my website design, but I’ll keep it in mind!

Website Details

The specifications for our final website call for us to create 5 to 8 pages. Some of those are given – home, about, and links – and the rest of those we create in support of our topic. For an Alaska topic, I’d like to create 4 additional pages for a total of 7 pages in all.

I’m thinking about devoting one page each to the port cities of Ketchikan, Juneau, and Skagway, and then I’d like to do one more page about glaciers & fjords. Each page would include thumbnails of photographs that users could mouse-over and enlarge (as we practiced in our recent Skills Assessment), along with text explaining the photographs. I think it would make sense for each page to be available from the home page, but also to offer the option of moving from Ketchikan to Juneau and from Juneau to Skagway (etc) without going back to the home page. So there would either be some tutorial-style “next” and “previous” links included in the pages, or each page would be available in a navigation bar that remained visible no matter where you were in the site.

After this I need to do a second review of my Alaska pictures to see which would be good candidates for inclusion in the website. That should be a good time!

"Cool" colors

If I go with Alaska as a topic for my final website (and I’m fairly sure that’s what I’d like to do at this point), I think I’ll aim to design the site with a cool – as opposed to warm – palate of colors. This is to pick up on the theme of Alaska being cold, and there being a lot of ice and glaciers there. I’m guessing that will steer me toward mostly using light blues, with perhaps some cool, light tones of purple or green or teal. Gray would be icy, but perhaps too neutral to lend itself to an appealing design.

I will want to think about what contrasting colors to use if my primary colors are going to be light. I obviously wouldn’t want the text to be light on top of a light background, so I’ll need to choose some darker colors. Hopefully I can find some dark shades that are in keeping with the cooler color palate of the site.

Alaska?

In search of inspiration for topics for my final website, I reviewed my digital photos from the last few years as I had planned. It was a great trip down memory lane, I have to say. Did it provide any useful ideas for my website? A lot of the photos were meaningful to me but wouldn't really be to other people. (As much as I think my nephew is amazing, and as much as I think you should think he's amazing too, I probably shouldn't make a website about him. Really, I don't want it to go to his head, do I?) So, many of the photos wouldn't be useful in this context.

A very helpful comment on my previous blog post suggested I look into stock photography available on the web or at Drexel. While that would solve my photography problem, it wouldn't solve my expertise problem -- where I really am just struggling to think of an area where I have anything original to say. It would be great to have free photos, but if I don't have a unique theme to tie them together, then I still have work to do.

I'm thinking a compromise might be for me to do something like an "Alaska Photo Journal." I have great pictures of Alaska from my 2006 trip there, but I was nervous about using them in a website because I'm by no means an Alaska expert. I thought I'd have to go looking up secondary information to include in the site, which really wasn't in the scope of our assignment. But, now I'm wondering if I do have enough knowledge to make Alaska work as a topic. I could include the pictures, and my original text could include what's in the picture, where the picture was taken, other interesting things about the photographed places -- all based on my experience. I'll have to think on this for a bit, but it's the best solution I've come up with so far.

Website Graphics

Since we are encouraged to use original graphics for our INFO 652 final website project, another way to come up with a topic for the website would be to think first about images. What digital photographs have I taken that would lend themselves to a topical website? Or, what digital photographs could I take now with a topical website in mind?

I'd like to review the digital pictures I've taken over the last few years, to refresh my memory on what those pictures include. I'm pretty sure most of the photos revolve around a few different themes -- vacations, family holidays, and my amazing one-year-old nephew -- but there may be some other themes of interest as well. Of course, it will be an interesting challenge to review these pictures! We're about a year behind on printing digital photographs, and since my husband has been charge of getting pictures off the camera, I don't really know where the rest of the pictures are or how to access them. I guess this will be a good excuse to find out!

I'm not opposed to taking new pictures for our final website project, but I would want to have a pretty well-directed idea for the topic of the website before doing any kind of photo shoot.

Expertise?

I was somewhat discouraged after our last class session of INFO 652, and after reading the assignment to come up with a website topic. Here's what got me down: our website is supposed to be based on our own personal knowledge and expertise. Now, let's say, you work full time, are a graduate student, are trying to keep a house and a family running, and you haven't had a lot of time over the last several years to be developing significant personal knowledge and expertise? That makes it a little more challenging to come up with a suitable website topic!

I think what frustrated me the most was the feeling that I USED to be a person with significant personal knowledge and expertise. I used to play the violin, and while I was no virtuoso, I was pretty good at it. I used to be pretty near fluent in sign language and do a lot of interpretation at my church. I used to do creative writing, and I used to draw -- and now I don't do any of those things, because my time is filled with work (as in employment), home work, and house work.

I thought about making a website for people who used to be good at things, but that just made me even more depressed. I guess the challenge for me will be to look at my current situation and think of areas where I do have something to contribute. I'll try not to complain as much in the future as I move forward with this, but I needed to get that latent frustration off of my chest. Having recognized my limitations, it should be easier to proceed in spite of them.

Take two

This is just me making sure that I can get back to the page where I can write posts. It looks like I can, which is good!

This is my first blog post.

Today is my first day as a blogger. But I'll be doing much more of this in the future (or at least for the next three weeks.)