The concept for my page, Psytrance culture, was to try and tackle the subject using dynamic images and sound (to help represent a psychedelic theme). Choosing the colour scheme and background did not go without thought. Settling on the deep red fractal background, while relating to the subject area but still not overpowering, as I found with many other psychedelic style backgrounds.
The page was designed using Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Designing the 'header' image, as well as the 'home' menu display in Photoshop were very time consuming and adjusting the header width to match the background was something I encountered problems with. Finally by Re-Photoshopping with pixel perfect dimensions I was able to seamlessly integrate the header with the background.
The next step I took was too create the layout of the extra pages using Dreamweaver. By creating a container div, header div and main div I was able to separate the elements and structure the page.
The actual menu bar itself was created using a spry menu on Dreamweaver + buttons I created using Photoshop. I found most information either from www.w3schools.com, various web forums or by getting help from a friend with web experience.
The first major issue I had was when I realised the home page was unable to be the first initial page. This was because the Tumblr blog was being assessed. The next best option was to add it an another additional page. Also unfortunately I was un-able to re-attach the spry menu to the art / music / about page because of lack of time.
Had time permitted I was planning to use sound samples taken from various psytrance song's as a roll over effect to each button on the 'home' menu. As well as extra images, representing sound waves coming from inside the speaker.
The music and art pages, suffered a strange problem when 'div align' tags failed to centre the pages. The music playing widget was chosen from www.grooveshark.com this free mp3 file sharing site was a perfect choice, having access to thousands of songs meant I didn't have to upload anything just select from their library. Meaning Tracks and playlist can easily be customized and changed. I was also able to create a Facebook 'like' button and found the coding for a browser icon for my extra pages.
The Art Page was also troublesome (working better on IE for unknown reasons), after experimenting with plenty of flash and Javascript image galleries, I finally managed to add a working flash gallery. By downloading and uploading the .swf file with appropriate images attached in flash, I was able to successfully add this to the page. A further thumbnail sized image gallery was included, from code found on w3schools.com. Unfortunately by adding this gallery to my main div , it caused the background to randomly end halfway through the page. I tried several unsuccessful methods to try to solve this, including background repeat in css and by re-arranging <div> </div> to no prevail. However on IE I was able to overcome this difficulty.
Data collected from Google Analytics from Tuesday 15th of May to Wednesday the 23rd of May showed the page accumulated 55 visits in that time. Interestingly with a wide range of demography, with visitors from, in descending order, Australia, the United States, Portugal, Brazil, Czech Republic, India, Italy and Slovenia. The blog attracted 90 followers since the start of semester, and blog post's received plenty of attention, with one image getting close to 600 re-blog's. The relatively low bounce rate of %34 was also a good indicator for the site.
I found coding to be challenging and excruciatingly intricate with a need for a sharp attention to detail. However I feel great achievement for when on occasions problems had been solved and this furthered my interest. In weeks to come I shall finish all un-resolved issue's to my site and continue to add, experiment and learn.
