Week 3

Workshop 1

This week’s workshop was a supportive learning workshop. This meant that I could work on my gallery that I started and research into how to improve it. My gallery theme is Taylor Swift albums, meaning I had each image be the album cover from each of her albums in chronological order. The first thing I did in this workshop was research different elements I could add to my website. In the end I chose to implement two new elements into my websites design.

The first thing I chose to implement was an animation for the gallery images when a mouse was hovered over them. I did some research into different effects that could be added and ended up implementing a simple fade animation. When a mouse is hovered over the image the images saturation fades.

I then chose to implement a hyperlink into the images that takes the user to the Spotify pages that relate to the albums on my gallery. I first researched how I could do this and then got my links ready. This was a very simple thing to add to my code, that I feel elevated my website.

Technical Workshop

In this week’s technical workshop we learnt about responsive web design. I was already confident in using the grid method to implement responsive design but learnt more on the flexbox method. I really enjoy learning multiple ways to implement the same element. The flexbox method seemed difficult to understand at first but after learning more about I think it’s something I would rather use to implement galleries than the grid method.

Lecture and Morning Workshop

For this week the lecture was taken over by someone who specialises in WordPress. We were introduced into some of the uses of WordPress and how we could possibly use it in the future if we choose a web developer career route. I found it fascinating to see all the ways that WordPress websites could be set up and navigated.

The following morning, our first workshop was taken over by the same person and we learnt how to edit our own WordPress sites. We were able to change our colours, themes and add home pages. I really like the new set up and found it fascinating to see how we can edit the HTML on editors like VS Code to change aspects of our websites.

Workshop 2

In the second workshop this week we were introduced to JavaScript and its uses. We learnt how it can be used to modify aspects on websites when events occur. We were also introduced to the concepts of variables, both constants and lets. As I already had some knowledge of coding with C# this wasn’t a new concept to me but I learnt how to implement it in JavaScript using the HTML as well.

Research

This week, I also finished off my exercise 2 work into a CSS framework. I chose to research the framework Bootstrap. The end of last week and beginning of this one, I conducted all my research and wrote notes on Bootstrap’s concepts, advantages, and disadvantages. I then began gathering my research and ideas into a document, that displayed my thoughts clearly. I made sure to add all my references and links at the end of my document so everything I said could be backed up. I really enjoyed researching Bootstrap and writing notes on all its aspects.