Emily Gauger

Well, that test was way harder than I thought it was going to be. That was kind of sucky. Fingers crossed for good results.

Im excited about this next section with creating cool nav bars. I never really thought of those interesting ones on those websites we looked at as nav bars and I think it will be cool to discover more really nice ones and how to code those.

We had a presentation over Lev today and he has a really cool website. I think that selfiecity project is really interesting. Its funny how selfies have become such a widespread thing that it becomes art.

Quote of the day: “The number one most used one is Internet Explorer. Kill me.” -Colleen

In class, writing out the code on the white board was actually really helpful. It was difficult though and I don’t completely understand it, but I think if we did it more often, I would get the hang of it. Doing interactive things like this are a lot easier to grasp the concept of it rather than doing the book tutorials. I also like that we’re building our pages slowly bit by bit so that we can understand exactly what we’re doing.

We went over a lot of stuff in class today and it was a bit overwhelming. I got a bit lost at times but I found my way back to the track. It was helpful to open up that file and add sections and change the background colors to our colors. That helped to see how to actually code what were doing and it was a relief to see that it wasn’t as hard as I thought. Crit was also beneficial. It was good to get a better idea of what she was looking for in these pages and what worked well and what wasn’t so good. I think this is moving in a lot more stable direction now and things are more clear cut. Moving forward from today, I’m no longer scared to code my pages.

Today in class we learned about a lot of really helpful websites. I’ve already explored a few of them a little bit, and I am excited to explore them more in depth. Theres a lot of really beautiful fonts out there that I want to download. I also really love the color palette generator. Its really helpful and convenient to experiment with the colors and see what they look like right next to each other there. I was also excited to see that both of the google fonts that I downloaded and used on my pages were on the list of the top 10 recommended Google fonts. I also found a site with examples of Google fonts beautifully typeset and its really great for inspiration. After looking at these sites and learning more, Im excited to see how my pages will change in between today and Wednesday.

As far as coding goes, I actually do enjoy CSS. It’s a really interesting language to learn and is a lot more interesting than if we were to just learn HTML. Like Ali said in class today, it’s kind of like the long version of Indesign, rather than just moving things where you want and adjusting your text with the toolbar up top, you have to code all of that stuff in. So essentially, its like the long drawn out/super techy version of working in Indesign.

Looking at Google Fonts today in class, I found that there are actually a lot of great ones! A few that I like include Lato, Old Standard TT, Pacifico, Dancing Script, Great Vibes, and Poiret One. This is a great new tool for designing and its so simple to insert these typefaces into your code.

The coding examples that we did in class today were really helpful and I think it’d be really beneficial to do more like those. The one I’m talking about is the red page where we had to make our basic page look like the nice pretty one. It was good to try and figure out how to do things, and then if you got stuck, you could swing over to the other page and look for what you’re missing or where you went wrong. That seemed like it was more helpful than the book tutorials, because the book tutorial you read it and then just type what it says. But these, you had to try and figure it out on your own and search for things. I think it stuck in my brain more.

Coding. This word is really scary. While I am really excited to learn about code and how to code, I am really afraid that this won’t come easy to me. I definitely think it is important to know for future careers, and my dad, who is a computer programmer will be extremely excited to know this is what I am doing in class. He may be getting some phone calls asking for help.

Though on the first day, I have already learned how to navigate around WordPress on a basic level- how to make a post, a page, see other pages, create categories, etc. I also learned that CMS stands for Content Management System and does exactly what it is says, manages content on a website.

Overall, I am excited to learn everything and hope that it comes fairly easy.