Week 6 Basics of Web Design

Website Summaries –
I used FrontPage to create my website and choose Weebly as my online web editor. I ran into a few setbacks when I started to create my site in FP. I guess the biggest issue for me was that I started my website as a page vs. a new website and had to basically redo it. Fortunately I was able to save my files. It was just a matter of moving and at times renaming.

In FP, I decided to create my own buttons and used quite a bit of different photos within the site. I decided to go with a banner that includes a photo at the top and bottom. Originally I had a frame around my website. I removed the frame and decided I liked it better without the frame. The bold borders on the top and bottom banner seemed to create a nice frame themselves. To me the site looked cleaner without the added border and I used this “look’ throughout the website.

It seemed easier for me to create the site in FP vs. with weebly because I had more freedom with FP. For example, I used the sunflower theme with my FP site. I basically wanted the background of the theme for my site. I wasn’t able to figure out how to apply this or any other background in my weebly site. It seems as though this cannot be changed in weebly once a theme is selected. Another noticeable difference was the photo gallery option. FP was a little quirky, especially, the slideshow option. I ended up using the photo gallery instead of the slideshow. Weebly offered a photo gallery but I didn’t see where I could insert comments.

The biggest difference between the two programs for me was the way I had to link the recipes I included in the site. In FP, it was easy to do. I typed the recipe name and then linked that to a PDF file that I created. When the hyper link was clicked on, a new page would open showing the recipe. Weebly was much different. I tried different approaches. It was easy in weebly to upload a file and attach it to a link. However, it didn’t look nice because it was jut a PDF icon and the file name. I ended up created a page for each recipe I wanted to share. These pages were “hidden”. On the recipes page I created a hyperlink and linked to the hidden page. I had to create a “back to recipes” link to get back to the starting point. I did this for every recipe.


Weebly would not allow me to make the bottom banner as wide as I wanted to and as result it appears smaller in weebly vs. FP.

One last comment is I was unable to change the banner at the top of the weebly page. It would end up changing all of them. I decided to go with the original banner on all pages and then have headings on each page.

Class Comments:
I learned a great deal about photo editing and html in this class. As much as I love photography, I will certainly use my new skills to have fun with photos I’ve taken over the years. I especially liked the colorize effect and will be using this with some of photos that I have of my ancestors. Another new topic for me was html. I never actually coded html before and was excited to learn about it in class. I can see how it would be beneficial for anyone to know at least a little about this and how to manipulate html code. I found myself doing this from time to time while working in FP.