| When I first took this course I knew exactly what I wanted. I have
been working with webs for some time in my University but all the work
we did was not our work, it was not something we were doing. What we did
was edited it and then uploaded. It was a pretty hard and exhausting work.
You can check it here. My aim in this
course is not to create a web page because I have already done some of
them but what I wanted to do is understand more about how the web is designed.
I wanted to learn how things work for the people who use the information we post. I think when I was working in Spain I did not realize about the audience and about the fact that sometimes the form you choose for designing your web page is just that, your design for you. However, that format may not be the perfect one for the audience you are thinking about. I have to say that all that I know, which is not too much, I learnt it by myself, just playing with all the programs such as Netscape Composer, Macromedia Flash, Microsoft Front-page, etc. Because of that reason I wanted also to improve my skills when designing. I think that you can improve your designing skills with programs and at the same time you have a better idea of what people want or what people don't want, even if you are not doing great web pages, you have made a big step. I think I have made that step. From now and on, every time I see a web page I try to read it and understand who is its intended audience? What are they talking about? Why do they have this or why don't? That is why I can not say that there has been an evolution in my web page because I was not interested in inserting a background or a new image. Instead of that, what I wanted to know is how those images can affect the reader, how the background can make a web page easier, more attractive, more legible. Another point is that since my English has been improved, it is a lot easier to work with programs such as Flash, because sometimes the smallest details can mean a lot, and I have found myself lost in a creation just because of some strange word that I couldn't figure out what it meant. The future: I really want to keep working with these tools. I have always thought that the Internet is a world wide tool and all the programs we have been using allow us to get a little bit closer to that universal tool. I am going back to Spain and back to the department, but now I have lots of new ideas for redesigning our web site and also how to improve it. If I have to be critic with my web site I have to say that my site is awful. It takes so long to finish it but the moment you upload everything and you take a look at your web page you realize that you are already tired of it. For me, web development has a continuous meaning. You can upload the latest version of your pages but soon you'll find something else that forces you to reorganize everything. It happened to me when we started to learn how Dreamweaver works. I had a little notion of this programs but when I saw in class all the advantages it had I realized that I had to change my web site. So, this is a never-ending story, from my point of view all the web pages should have the icon that says "under construction" because there is not a round and finished web space, completely defined and limited. You will always find more information that you are interested in and you will want to add to your web space. It happens to me everyday, because people have new ideas everyday and we want to share them with the rest of the people. I guess my next step is, as I said, to keep working with these programs and developing these new ideas and also trying to learn the new ways of developing web sites, like Unix, Java (not that new), Php3, etc. I am really upset because I hate being sick and I know I have missed almost three weeks of class. I tried to be in contact by e-mail with one of my classmates so he was telling me all the time what we were doing in class. |