Web Authoring

Monday, 15 April 2013

CSS

CSS:
CSS stands for Cascading style sheets, basically how the webpage is visually displayed, so pretty much similar to HTML. This is a 'style sheet language' used to descirbe the presentation of a website and also the look and formatting of a document written in a mark-up language (HTML/XHTML)
This includes setting formatting for type, layout, colours, margins, backgrounds and border which are all used on the page of the website, this is all by Mark-up language.
<div> tags are usually used, basically a box that all content and instructions are put into, style sheets are used to control the size, shape and layout of these boxes.
When building a website in dreamweaver, all the settings are automatically converted to CSS.

HTML & XHTML

HTML:
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, it is not a programming language, it is a markup language. A markup language is basically a set of mark up tags, which means they descirbe how the text should be displayed.
HTML tags are keywords surrounded by brackets <html>, HTML tags normally come in pairs like <b> & </b>
The first tag in a pair is the start and the second is the end, these tags are NOT case-sensitive, they can be written in lower case, UPPER case or a mixture of the two, whichever, will work, they are usually written in UPPER case as this makes them stand out from the rest of the document.
XHTML stands for Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, this is a combination of HTML and XML, it is a stricter cleaner version of HTML, new browsers support XHTML. It uses the same principals as HTML yet a more dynamic website. XML was designed to describe data and HTML was designed to display data. Some webpages like PDA's and phones struggle with some websites which is why XHTML was created to help with problems like this.
XHTML are case sensitive, these MUST be out in lowercase for it to work, they must always be closed and properly nested.

Authoring

Authoring:
Authoring basically means to write or construct an electronic document or system (authored the companys website) Authoring allows designers to invent, plan and create a product to give to an audience, authoring is available through software packages also.
Authoring Formats:
CD-Rom
Website
Games
Computer based training
Presentations- Powerpoint
Interactive TV
Handheld Devices- Android, IPhone etc.
The purpose of these formats are to create entertainment, research and marketing promotions. To help make them more exciting and interesting features like text, graphics and sounds can be added, these are considered to be essential when promoting an interactive product.
Opreating tools are also added so that users can operate the website, this including buttons, events and hotspots!

Tuesday, 9 April 2013

Web Design- Use of Colour

Use of Colour

When creating a website, colour is a very important aspect to consider. The way colour is represented reflects back on the target audience, for example, if you were creating a gaming website, the colours do not want to be baby pinks/blues and purples they need to be more aggressive, gaming colours like blue black or reds, blue is a mandatory colour which means its a colour that most people like and red is the colour of danger, which in most games made have a lot of danger and violence in them. Beauty websites are more likely to include more girly colours like pinks, golds and the lighter option of colours like light blue, this represents beauty and that the companys are friendly.

Web Design-Lead Lines

Lead Lines

Lead lines are what makes you follow an image, take for example the one underneath, this lead line is the line in the middle of the road, it automatically catches your eye and you follow the line which curves the image, by the line also being yellow its much easier to be grabbed into the picture. The lines take you to the message of the image, i.e the mesage in this image could be mystery, where is the road taking you to? etc. It is similar to rule of thirds, it draws you in to the important parts of the image.

Web Design-DOF

Depth of Field

Depth of field is the distance between the nearest and the farthest objects in an image that seen sharp. The lens will focus on the object nearest to it so the background in the image will be distorted. The object which is in focus looks as if its in 3D as the background is so out of focus, it seems to bounce off it.

Web Design-Rule of Thirds

Rule of thirds:

The rule of thirds is where an image is broken down into, as you can see 9 sections. Study shows that when looking at an image, the eye focuses first from the left to the right. As seen below, the eye focuses from the left more and down to the bottom right the least, this is where an image needs to have more information down the left hand side than the right.