Website Final

Hello class:

It was a fun term. I enjoyed taking the class. I hope to see you in another class.
Journal:
a. My target audience for my website is school age kids from age 8 or older. I tried to appeal to my audience by providing more colorful borders and headings as opposed to pastels, earth tones, or greys. I also used a fun fantasy font called Papyrus for the headings that I thought seemed more fun to incite interest. The menu buttons are decorative with feet print to make the buttons pop out more and provide a dinosaur theme to the site. When the buttons are rolled over the feet print have a inner drop shadow to appear as though the feet print are making an impression on the button. I also added a little section called "Fun Facts" that provides tidbits about dinosaurs with a cartoon graphic to appeal to the younger crowd.

b. The SEO planning I used was to include relevant words as best I could into the header tags and links. The meta tags use keywords that are the most common words throughout my site. I also checked the words in Google Adwords to make sure the words I used are the best. All of my words have a low competition rating. Also, I have links are to popular websites related to the subject matter of my site. I checked the website for the American Museum of Natural History at linkpopularity.com and it is a very popular website and is well traveled. It should help my search ranking because they have a lot of content about dinosaurs.

c. I checked with the colour contrast tool to fix issues with contrast. I checked the site with cynthiasays.com and passed my accessibility with alt tags. I tested my site in firefox, safari, IE, and chrome. I checked it in browser lab, but it show safari layout all messed up so I double checked it in a live safari browser and it appeared okay in all browsers tested.

My tester's name is Valarie. She said she liked the fun facts at the top of the page because it caught her attention. She suggested to move the fun fast section lower in the page, but I couldn't think of an efficient way to do that because my content would be shoved below the fold, so I kept it there. She also advised for me to move a link on my trivia page because the link was at the bottom as was unnoticeable. So now I have it above the media content where it's more visible. Also, she noticed my font on my heading was different on the first page and didn't seem to match the rest of the site, so I changed the layout and color to make it uniform.

d. I validated my html and css. Everything passed except for the embed tag I had to use for the media file linked from Youtube. I tried an iframe tag originally, but it wouldn't play in IE so I had to use the embed and param tags, but the param tags don't validate.

e. I used images that were directly related to the information they were arranged by. The box model made the images appear more finished and uniform.

f. I changed the font color to white because the background are different colors and provided a border between cells. I collapsed the table to show a clean separation between cells.

g. The media needs a flashplayer plugin. The media is from youtube and it provides a fun example of how dinosaurs are in movies. It captures the attention of the user.

h. http://sws.pcc.edu/student/CAS206_pdeangel_43493/byronstine50/final/index.html

This was a fun website to make. I didn't think I would enjoy the testing phase, but I received a lot of feedback and neat ideas.