It doesn't feel as if much time has passed since my last reflection. In the past week I've been working on the content for my website. The information is already available, but I've been sorting through it to be sure that I have everything I need and also to be sure that there isn't any miscellaneous information that isn't appropriate for my site. Then I'll remove all of the formatting so that I can copy it from Word and paste & format it for the website. I'm also considering changing the colors of my site so that they are more representative of UT. While I'm not crazy about "UT orange", I think I can make an exception in this case. I haven't made up my mind yet, so as of right now the colors might stay as they are.

Creating an image map for my web graphics assignment was easy, but I had trouble making a transparent GIF. I'm not sure if this is because I have an old version of Photoshop Elements, but none of the instructions that I followed seemed to work. I probably feel the most frustrated in situations like these where no matter what I do, nothing seems to work as I want.

I've decided that the Short & Green book wasn't very helpful in teaching me the more complicated aspects of DW (specifically CSS, templates, and forms). I've even gone as far as to get several other DW guides from the library to see if they are any better. I just felt as if I was going through the motions with many of the Short & Green exercises, and now that I want to apply what I've learned to my own website, I have to look for additional help.

An aha! moment - depending on their download rate, perhaps these pretty backgrounds that I've been using for my reflection pages weren't a great idea! I definitely won't use textured backgrounds on my project website, as the pages will need to be quick loading. Since my audience will usually be searching for specific information, this will be very important so that they don't become annoyed by a slow loading page. I've also found the Editorial Style chapter to be very helpful. I know that reading on the web differs from reading printed pages, but this chapter reinforced how important it is to pay attention to online style and all that it encompasses.