I actually have learned some very basic knowledge regarding HTML back in my secondary school days. So basically when I was having the lecture and was doing the exercises, I was trying to recall all the memories that faded away years ago. In addition, I sometimes went through internet to get some assistance when I was not clear with some coding on the lectures and tutorials.
I guess there weren’t much tools or technologies I used for my webpage, since we were only taught and told to get the assignment done by using Notepad. But I did use search engine (Mozilla Firefox) and Communication tool (MSN Messenger) when I was doing my webpage. For the Notepad, I found out that it wasn’t too hard for me to understand its concept and technique to make a webpage using it, perhaps I have already had basic knowledge regarding of HTML and also internets. And the only disadvantage I could think of is it doesn’t give introductions and helps to beginners on how to make a webpage like what other HTML designing tools do.
My group member and I have encountered the problem in the layout of our webpage. Because we wanted to have our text easier to read despite the background image has different colours. So we used some contrast colours on certain texts, e.g. “a second” & “personal”. We thought it was perfect until we uploaded it into bravehost.com. Advertisement was added to our blog so basically everything was moved differently to what we have designed. And as we rearranged the layout again and got everything done, we found that the webpage will somehow looked differently again when using other computer to browse the webpage. More advertisements will be added into our blog because it is a free web server. And the length and width of the advertisements vary according the content. We think that all of the free web server will inevitably have a lot of advertisements, and as the design and layout will not be assessed, so we just have to give up on this issue.
I have no problems on uploading all the required files into free server; despite the time it took me to upload the background music. The mp3 file was uploaded to the host and link was copied to be embedded in the HTML file. The display photos are easy because I want to use the photos which have already uploaded into Facebook. Lastly I uploaded the HTML file to the server and basically everything was done. Regarding the blog which I am writing right now, I have no problem for it also because I have few experiences of blogging in the past.
If I were to redo this assignment again, I would try to reduce all the items size. E.g. background image, background music and pictures. It is because when I was doing the webpage, I did not consider the internet speed in Malaysia, which is not fast enough to have high quality pictures loaded in a moment, and also the visitors might already close the page before the background music is done loading n starts playing. Furthermore, regard the problem of the layout that causes difficulty to read my webpage’s text; I would avoid using fancy background pictures and fonts, just keep it simple and nice if the contents are more important.
In conclusion, I do enjoy the process of creating the webpage though there were a few technical problems. I personally think that the concept of HTML is kind of similar to my pathway of Film & Television in Mass Communication, which is – we create something from nothing. By doing step-by-step and some correction, with only a few of tags and items that we could actually make a webpage that is so interesting.
