About

I read the spec sheet for this assignment during the first week of the Easter holidays, and (after the initial panic) decided to split the task up into three sections:

I decided to tackle the javascript first, since I had recently been doing a lot of Java programming practice. To start off my index.html page, I created a text area and a button. I searched online for functions involving currentTime, and found a very useful website called Tiztag which showed how to create a function that displayed the current date and time. I used this as a basis for my welcome() function, and incorporated several if and else if statements to determine what greeting to display in the alert pop-up. I then set the output of the function to include the name input in the text field, and for the the script to be run when the button is clicked.

Then came the task of making the website look interesting and attractive. I decided to add a greeting picture, and this helped me decide on the color scheme for the website. Whilst I was still in a Javascripting mood, I decided to add a script which ran when the picture is clicked (if you haven't already found it) as a little easter-egg joke. As for the layout of the page, I initially wasted a lot of time by trying to set the banner and menu sections of the page to float and only having the content section scrollable (as it is on the university webmail). However, after many unsuccessful attempts at this, I decided to just do what the spec sheet instructed and used div tags, along with styles and absolute positioning, to dictate the websites layout.

I left the use of Cascading Style Sheets till the very end, which I now realize to be a big mistake. I made my site mainly through tial and error, with very little planning at the start, and therefore ended up using a lot of deprecated tags and attributes. These caused a lot of errors in my validation, and I spent a long time finding these, and trying to incorporate them into my CSS file to fix. In the end, I was only able to minimize the number of errors, and so far none of my XHTML will fully validate.

Although my website is simplistic in design, I am pleased with the way it turned out. I acknowledge that more forward planning and design would have been beneficial for the validation process and making the CSS, and will take that into account when making websites in the future.