Monday, April 30, 2012

Web Design Blog- Website Design and Development Process

There are six main steps in the website design and development process. The first step in the process is information gathering. You need to know the purpose of your site, what goals you have for the site, who your target audience is, and what information you want displayed on your page. The second step in the process is planning. You need to develop a site map. The site map should including a listing of all the main topics and sub-topics. By making a list of your topics it will help to guide what content makes it to the site. The third step is design. It is important to determine who your target audience is because once you start designing a page aimed at a teenager is going to look a lot different than a page aimed at senior citizens. You should also keep in mind the colors of your business and incorporate those into the design. The fourth step in the process is development. This is the point in the process where the web site itself is actually created. This is where you put all the information that you have been gathering. The fifth step in the process is testing and delivery. During this part of the process you will be testing your website and making sure everything is working properly. The sixth and final step in the process is maintenance. You need to keep your content current and up to date, by doing so you will get repeat visitors.

Web Design: Brief History of the Internet!

    This is a brief history of the internet. In 1957, the USSR launches the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. President Dwight  D. Eisenhower responds to this by setting up ARPA(Advanced Research Projects Agency). About 18 months later they had their first successful satellite and had put the US on the map. In 1962, Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation did a study to try and figure out how it could control missles and bombers after a nuclear attack, if one were to occur.  Baran came up with an idea call packet-switching. It broke down datagrams into origin and destination so the computer could send them from computer to computer until they got to where they needed to be. In 1968, ARPA awarded the ARPANET to BBN. BBN decided to use a Honeywell microcomputer to use as the base for the switch. The actual structural link was built in 1969 and connected University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah.  In 1972, the first email program was created by Ray Tomlinson. 1976, Dr. Robert M. Metcalfe develops Ethernet, which allows for data to move really fast from place to place. 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and CERN in Geneva implements a hypertext system to provide efficient information access to members of an international physics community. In 1995, NSF reports that they will no longer allow direct access to the NSF backbone.  They contracted out to four companies to sell connections to groups, organizations, and companies. In 1999, Wi-fi is invented and changes the world.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Web Design Goals!

My goals for this class are to successfully learn how to code a website and get a good grade doing it. I’m looking forward to learning how to hand code a website instead of just using Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver might be simpler to use but it’s good to know how to hand code if you ever really need to do it. It’s a lot cheaper than the Dreamweaver software… When I first learned that I had to take a web design class I was not excited. I thought it was going to be really boring. I’m starting to think that it’s not going to be as bad as I thought. I’ve only been to one class but I think it might actually be fun. I’m not scared to learn how to code, I think that it will be very beneficial for me to learn and will help me further my career as a photographer and graphic designer. It never hurts to learn the basics of something before you move on to new, easier ways of doing things. It’s kind of similar to when I started going to school for photography, you take a basic photography class and you use film cameras. Not very many people use film anymore but it is always a good to learn the basic fundamentals before moving forward.