For Boston Fashion Week, I was honored to walk for the wonderful designer Lily & Migs. After the show was over, I decided to dig into their website to see what other kinds of clothing they design.

http://www.lilyandmigs.com/#!

What a beautiful webpage. You are greeted by a sleek top horizontal navigation bar and a large picture of a beautiful woman decked out in Lily & Migs gear. It's so easy to know what page you're on because once you click, the item you click on becomes underlined. You can always navigate to other places on the website because everything is laid out right before your eyes; there is no scrolling necessary. I feel as though the site gives you the feeling of smallness. Since the layout is rather simple, you do not feel overwhelmed as you click though.

However... I clicked on their "boutiques" link and clicked through to see where the clothing is sold and found this eyesore:

http://tancreeds.com/index.htm

This page uses a vertical navigation bar which is neither attractive nor coherent. As you scroll down the webpage, there are large pixelated images screaming in your face which do not have any information attached to them. Not only are the colors on this site distracting, but the thousand different fonts, font sizes, and font colors are horrid. As the viewer, you have some idea how to navigate; however, once you click on something, you have no idea why you would have wanted to click on it. Take this page for example: http://tancreeds.com/index_files/Page1077.htm This page is supposed to let you know what events they have coming up in the future. Once you get there, you are on your own.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any uglier or laughable, you click on this portion of the website: http://tancreeds.com/index_files/Page441.htm What the heck?

Website Number 1!

www.postsecret.com

PostSecret is the largest advertisement-free Blog in the world. The objective of this website is to share secrets from around the globe. People from all over send decorated postcards with a secret on them to Frank Warren. Every Sunday, he publishes a selection of secrets for everyone to enjoy.
Judging by the secrets, the target audience consists of men and women who can read. The secrets shared are from people old and young from all over.

The content isn't very interactive on this website. It's more of an art gallery of beautiful images. On the side, there are links to PostSecret's Facebook, Twitter, and Google pages. There is also a bar to have PostSecret send weekly emails.

The flow of this website is perfect. You can scroll through, see each image without clicking it and browse events once you hit the bottom of the site. It would be nearly impossible to get lost on here as there are not many places to click around.

Website Number 2!

www.grooveshark.com

This website is the Google of music. You can literally find everything on here with just a few clicks of your keys. The objective of this site is to give everyone access to music without paying a dime for it. No downloads are needed, as you can create playlists which are accessible at any time. I feel as though there really is no target audience for this website. The ease of it's interface makes it's possible for virtually anyone to latch onto it. Content on this webpage is music based. There are different tools to create personal playlists, access other user's playlists, and access radio stations. Grooveshark lets you upload any kind of music/sound clip. Last night I found a very obscure radio comedian personality on Grooveshark which wasn't on Youtube or Google video. It was awesome.

The flow of the website is easy breezy. When you type in Grooveshark.com,  the first page that shows up is a search engine so you can find what music you're looking for. There are not a lot of buttons to fiddle with so once you type in the artist or the song, the rest is cake.

It's very hard to get lost in this site; as I said before: It's so easy to use it would take some effort to lose yourself in it.

This article was helpful because it gave me a little peace of mind. When we first started designing our websites, I was pretty horrified by the white background, the text flushed all the way to the left, and the black Times New Roman font staring back at me. Now I know not to confuse presentation with meaning and that we will learn CSS to make my website more beautiful. (Thank goodness)

By having a solid semantic structure in a document, this makes it so people using computers where CSS cannot be applied can read it, it can help web developers maintain the code and separate the HTML from the CSS, and probably the most important feature is that there will ultimately be less code which wont be cluttered by formatting which will make the webpage load faster.

Week One

Three things I have learned from class:

• I finally learned what the tiny dump truck on the sidebar was. It's function isn't nearly as cute as it's icon.
• I learned how to type a very basic code for the first time ever.
• The book taught me how to create headings for my website. I can dig it.

Any Questions Yet?

As of now, I'd like to explore different fonts. I do not enjoy staring at Times. 

Here's Katie and I working on our blogs.