Readings: Responsive Design

Going through this week’s readings, what stood out to me the most was the point Ethan Marcotte made in his article about the “more adaptive approach” being the way forward in web design. I think it’s important to keep in mind that technology is constantly changing, and as Marcotte points out, creating technology that adapts rather than just “tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices” is the only way to keep up.

Coding: CSS Intro & Homepage Prototype 

I really liked the way Codecademy introduced CSS in its lessons. For the most part, it was easy to follow along with the instructions and explanations. The trickiest lessons to understand were the last two on creating boxes and styling images. I think some of the explanations about sizing using pixels and percentages went over my head — as did the explanations about changing an element’s position on the page — and I will try to review these bits before class on Wednesday.

Despite how easy Codecademy made it seem, I had a much harder time putting together the prototype homepage than I anticipated. I thought the best way to start the process was to model my page after one of the pages from Codecademy and modify the code and content. The two things I struggled with the most were changing the color of the background and getting the text to move the way I would like. Initially, I wanted to change the background color to a plain white and fix the main image at the top of the page to have the text move over it as you scrolled. I think I did manage to change the background color after a couple of attempts, but, no matter what I tried, I couldn’t figure out how to configure the image and text to behave the way I wanted. I think my problem with the text came from not fully understanding Codecademy’s lesson on positioning.

Lastly, adding the code to GitHub also presented some challenges. Although I found the tutorial really helpful, following the steps the first couple of times, I kept receiving an error message that told me my repository failed to publish without any clear explanation about why. I finally got the files to appear on my account but am not sure exactly how I did it.