New Media Certificate Student
I want to better understand websites
Project One: Benji Land
For Project One, I built a three page site dedicated to my dog Benji, featuring his favorite people and a gallery of memories. This was my first time hand-coding a full website with HTML and CSS, and I learned a lot about structuring semantic HTML and keeping all my styling centralized in one external stylesheet. My biggest struggle honestly wasn't the code itself, but keeping track of all my HTML files, images, and folders organized on my Mac. Having so many tabs and files open at once, it got confusing fast, and I had to get over my fear of closing tabs and trust that I could always find my way back. I also learned to use browser dev tools to check for 404s and caching issues when my CSS wasn't loading consistently across pages, which was a great crash course in troubleshooting. I'm proud of the consistent color palette and typography (pairing Google's Rouge Script font with a soft, warm color scheme) that ties the whole site together. Going forward, I'd like to learn more about CSS animations and transitions to make the site feel more interactive.
Project Two: Marketing Made Simple
For Project Two, I built a three panel Bootstrap site about digital marketing. Panel One uses plain Bootstrap with my own custom.css, Panel Two uses the Agency theme as is, and Panel Three redesigns that theme with a new layout, my own light pink, yellow, and orange colors, and custom CSS like gradients, hover effects, and a fade-in animation. Compared to Project One, I was able to really focus more on the style of this project, which was fun. I didn't feel as overwhelmed by all of the files I had to keep track of, and that was a big win for me. I also found inspiration by looking at other websites, which was fun and helped me figure out the look I wanted.
View Project Two: Marketing Made Simple