The first thing was to come up with a name for my wife’s hobby/business – Laminated Love. Once we had the name, I created a custom Logo from a free heart image that I found on www.webweaver.nu. It’s obviously not that great, but after playing around with different fonts, colors, and layouts, I think I was alright.
After creating my sketched storyboard, I created a word document with the typed content that I planned on using for the web site. I then started using Dreamweaver to create my site, but I found it a little difficult to use since I wasn’t that familiar with the program. I didn’t want to abandon using Dreamweaver, so I looked online for some online Dreamweaver templates that might work. After a lot of searching, I only found one template that I liked, but the layout wasn’t perfect. I tried manipulating the template in Dreamweaver, but I just discouraged when I couldn’t really make the changes I wanted.
My next step was to install FrontPage 2003 (FP 2003), which I thought would be better since I was familiar with using it in class. However, since installing FP 2003, I started to have problems with explorer bombing-out whenever I tried to save word documents, Frontpage HTML files, and email attachments. Since I was away for the weekend, it made it quite difficult to get much done. I did make some changes to my storyboard, and I made some changes to written content of the web site.
When I got back home on Sunday, I spent a lot time taking pictures of the various samples my wife had, and I also went through 5 years worth of photos to get more content of her previous jobs. I found out how critical it is to have the right lighting when taking pictures of the candy bars, mints, and gift “baskets.” I then spent a lot time cropping and resizing the pictures in Photoshop so that the images could be used for the web.
Once in class on Monday I was able to work in FrontPage without any problems. I made a few changes to my web site design, and I picked a FP 2003 template that matched my color scheme of the Laminated Love logo. I did have to make a few color changes to logo in Photoshop to get a better color match. I then spent some more time resizing the photos I planned to use on the site. I did use the photo gallery in FP 2003 to import and adjust the images to be displayed, but in retrospect, I think that I should have just imported the pictures into tables to create a more customized layout.
After I got all of the pictures I wanted to use imported, I spent some time playing with the different font types, sizes and color. I found a purple heading font that matched “By Susan” in the logo, and I found that a black font for the text content of the page looked the best. After toying with the various fonts, I found that Verdana was a nice legible font for the site.
After tweaking the fonts, I adjusted the number of “pictures per row” and added columns on the left and the right of page to get a page layout that I liked. I also made a myriad of changes to the main page, which included adding/adjusting tables, pictures, and text, to try and get the best look. I then tweaked each page layout so that the spacing was about the same; this way when navigating to other pages on the web site it would match. On the main page I also downloaded free email and phone images and customized them in Photoshop.
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