I looked back to my very first blog post to see if I had accomplished the goals I listed there.  And to be totally honest, I really think I accomplished beyond what I had wanted to learn.  I stated I just wanted the basics but I was able to design two fully functioning websites in just a few weeks time.  I said that I felt web design was a very important skill for us graphic design majors to have and I still feel that way 100%.  It wasn’t necessarily the design aspect that I wanted to perfect, I felt strong in my ability to be able to design a well organized website. For me, it was mostly about the coding and what makes the website work.  I came in knowing absolutely nothing about web design, but just the other day I was playing around on my friends dreamweaver program and was able to make a working page in a matter of minutes.  That’s pretty impressive. When I say I knew nothing, I literally knew nothing about what it took to make a website.  So for me, this class was challenging but was all worth it in the end to say that I have skills in web designing.  I will definitely be taking web design two if I get the chance to.

This class was very beneficial for me and I’ve learned quite a bit over the semester. The only coding background I had coming into this class was a rough understanding of Flash. To be honest, the coding doesn’t really bother me too much. It’s all pretty self-explanatory and can be easily altered if need be – except when it comes to jQuery. That’s something that I’ll have to take more time to understand and effectively use. I feel like the biggest thing that I’ll take away from this class is the aesthetics of creating an interesting and effective website. It’s one thing to have a site that simply works, it’s a whole other challenge making that working site visually appealing without losing its functionality. I’m definitely planning on continuing to explore and create websites once this semester is over. Once I graduate, even if I have another job, I’m still hoping to do web design on the side. It’s nice because it’s actually fun and you don’t have to deal with the hassles (and cost) of print media.

I’ve learned a lot when it comes to designing for an e-commerce site. There’s a lot of things that I had to take into account in order to make it easiest for the consumer. I didn’t realize how much information I’d need to put into my site and how carefully I needed to organize it. This site construction needs a lot more structure to it. Since pre-critique I’ve taken out some unnecessary information and added the more important stuff. I’ve realized that for a store I don’t really need social networking buttons. I’ve added some more information on my homepage so that the consumer knows that I am a cupcake site and I sell them as well.

Thus far,  I have learned that it is very important to provide the proper information for the buyers – The buyer needs to know the price, the quantity, and they really would love to see good photography, and a user friendly website.  During pre-critique it was brought to my attention that my navigation buttons were too small, which I needed to fix in my photoshop file, and actually had to increase the file itself.  I am very glad that this was brought to my attention, and it has made me conscious on how big or small my images are etc. With a e-commerce food sites, it is important that the photos are big enough for the viewer to see enough detail to really sell the product.  If the photos don’t look appealing then it is not going to help sell your products.  I was also given some suggestions in the coloring in my one illustrated cupcake on my splash page.  The cupcake wrapper was a cool color in comparison to all the warm colors I used throughout the rest of the page.  This was an easy fix.  It was also suggested that I use the open gray bar to the left of my webpage; which I was using to create a pedestal for one illustrated cupcake as a call out/ navigation bar.  I thought this was a great idea, and have used it to display a small quote on my about page, and on the rest of the pages I included the flavors that are offered, which is a great idea in case someone was looking for a specific cupcake, and would not have to sift through a potentially long list of cupcakes. I am excited to see how everything works out with my site, as well as everyone else’s.

The most important thing I’ve learned about e-commerce sites is that the focus should always be on the product being sold. I found a common theme in most of the websites that I liked was a clean layout without needless things cluttering it up. I guess that just proves Krug’s points from his book. I tried to integrate this into my design by having only the essentials and allowing the product to dominate the page. During pre-critique it was suggested that I change the color of my navigation from light blue to pink or a warmer color such as yellow. This is probably the thing I’ve struggled with the most, I’ve changed it a few times since and it does work better, but I don’t know if I’m happy with it yet. I also added more descriptions to the products and adjusted the ordering options. Finally, I modified my design for dreamweaver so my navigation wouldn’t abruptly cut off when viewed on larger screens. I hadn’t considered this before, so I’m glad it was brought up.

All the websites I looked at we’re very organized, minimalistic, and easy to navigate. It was never an issue finding your cart or where to order. This however was a problem in others. I initially wanted to do my website in a step by step way to order cupcakes, starting with choosing a size, amount, then cake flavor, topping etc. From critique I realized it would be to confusing to do it that way because of the different selections of toppings, icing and cake flavors to mix and match. TOO many options. So now I’m scratching that idea and doing something different. I also wanted to use actual photos, but I think I’m just going to use a few cartoon like illustrations instead. Overall, I need to work on organization and cohesiveness. I always had too many similar colors (oranges and yellows) I plan to bring in some reds.

So far some things have been more difficult then others when building a e-commerce website. trying to figure out how to place things within the wrapper sometimes always does go according to plan, so I have to find other ways to solve problems. What I have learned is from the reading was, try to make the website as less complicated as you can because people dont want to think when there on the site. They want to find what there looking for and leave.

For my design, I wanted to try and make the site very easy to navigate through and make it easy for people to understand. I think my site have very good use of imagery, layout and the color scheme of the design. What was brought up was I had to add title to the different choices because the viewer wouldn’t know what there looking at. I also had to enlarge the imagery on some of the pages and rearrange the price layout on my check out page.

So far designing an e-commerce site has been more difficult in some areas then I expected. For instance, trying to figure out how you could order things, quantities and organization of all these things. Trying to visualize this was kinda tricky, even with researching different websites for ideas.

For pre-critique I actually had more questions for everyone else instead of the the other way around. I was really stumped on some things like the homepage layout and how my ordering page would work but I got great feedback and the changes made my design work a lot better. I was a little worried about the color choices, simply because it was mentioned to someone else that blue wasn’t a good color for food because it’s not appetizing; where most of my design is blue! I think it works in this case because I balance it out with green and yellow and it’s a cupcake website, so you could expect that food to be different colors. Now I’m working on building the site and hopefully can accomplish more of my design elements I want then for the last project. Gotta end the semester strong!…. and stay relatively sane.

After the pre-critique I realized there was a lot of things I wanted to change about my site. I now realize the most important thing for an e-commerce site is for it too be easy to access and navigate as well as find the items for sale. And having a site that’s easy to build in Dreamweaver would be an even greater benefit for me. So I decided to change around my site a little bit. I changed the home page to a simple design with a little text and there will be an imagery gif on the right. The only thing I am still questionable about is making a sub-navigation in my menu page. I want it to have all the info and prices in the sub menus and then when you click the images you can choose quantity and so forth which then gets added to the cart. How all this will work I’m going to need some help to accomplish, but this next week will give me the opportunity to do. Overall I’m excited to move forward in this project and I hope I will gain a better understanding of Dreamweaver then I did during this last project.