My site follows basic website principles. The sidebar on the left is where all the links are, the title is at the top of the page, the body of the page follows and then the footer contains the copyright information. Although this site design is over-used, I feel it is very easy to see everything the site has to offer so I do not think it should be changed.
I decided to give the site a hockey theme. I liked what I did with the Mini Zen Project by brightening the picture of the cards and making that the background. I decided to do something similar with hockey sticks. I feel it is more pleasing to look at than a boring white background. The picture of the goal in the top left was used to add a little bit of color to the site. The links also add a bit of color to the site. I liked the hover effect on the links that I used in the Mini Zen Project and thought I would use that again in this project. I wanted to make this website somewhat of an entertainment site, but also for possible employers to look at my writing. I include a link to my blog where I write videogame reviews. I also include some of my writing from WRT 150 and other writing classes. My resume is included as well.
The very first draft of my website was incredibly basic. I simply decided to make the entire background black and change the font color to white. I'm glad I decided to change that. While white on black is easier to read in my opinion, it gives off a very unprofessional look. I had originally planned to use tabs on this website as well. However, after finding some examples and implementing them into my code, I could never get them to work properly. Rather than spending the majority of the time trying to figure out how to get tabs to work, I decided to just move the links to the left side of the page in a standard format. Once I decided that I did not want a black background, I had trouble thinking of a theme I could use. In the last project, the theme did not have to do anything with the text. However, in this project it was a good idea to make the theme of the site somewhat relevant to the information that it contained. Hockey is my favorite sport and I felt that this was one of the "entertainment" parts of the website that I had discussed earlier. I may get rid of the pictures all together in the future, but for now I will leave it the way it is.
The first draft of the website contained a home page, an about page, and a photo page. I decided there was no use for one whole page to be dedicated to a picture of me, so I merged the about and photo pages together. Although the picture of me is not 100% professional, it is the best picture that I have of myself. Other people have commented that it is a good picture of me so I hope potential employers will like it as well. I also had the contact information on the home page. However, after remembering the Usability Tests that I had conducted earlier, I thought that I should just dedicate a whole page to contact information, this way people can easily find it without having to "think." I only had about three pages on my website and was not satisfied with the amount of information it contained. I reviewed the course website to get some ideas about what I could put on the site. I decided to link my blog to this site to give potential employers some samples of my writing. I also decided to put some of my writing from other writing classes just so the topics covered were not only about videogames. Although I hope to write for a videogame magazine, it's good to show that you have a wide range of topics that you can write about. I used the double-border to seperate the title and footer from the container. I originally had a dashed border, but after a few days felt it was unprofessional looking at decided on the double-border instead. I used a side border on the Mini Zen Project, but on this project since the sidebar was on the left instead of the right, I felt there was no need for a border. I also changed the color of the text of the links to red to further establish that it is not a part of the container.
The link design was found at Maxdesign. The pictures were taken from Microsoft Word XP clip art. After previewing other people's websites, I decided that I liked what Jorri did with the copyright information at the bottom of every page. Thank you Jorri for that bit of inspiration.