HTML Website
Reflection
Initial knowledge and Ideas
In my freshman year of college I took two computer science courses which gave me some experience in the world of coding, and more specifically C++. However the next year I planned follow a different path. However, on this new path I was already able to put my rudimentary knowledge of coding use. Even with some prior knowledge to writing code, two of the biggest challenges I faced while creating this website was formatting. It took a lot of trial, error, and research to figure out the div tag along with how to style and position these elements. Placing objects, pictures, and text where I wanted them was the most challenging process for me to figure out. Another problem I had trouble overcoming was making my website functional on a mobile device. Using the "@media" rule in CSS allowed me to set dimensions for elements for specific screen widths. It took a lot of attributes to get the site to be functional on mobile. Unfortunately, the site on mobile remains looking less than desirable.
HTML VS WordPress
Before starting my WordPress website I decided to fully complete my HTML website and then try to
recreate it in wordpress. However, what I found after beginning
on WordPress was I felt very limited in how In styles of my website. As I explored the maze of menus in WordPress,
I struggled to find seemingly simple styling options such as
background color. Along with this many of the optioned seamed to tailor more towards blog style pages,
which makes sense considering the website is popular
for blogs. While writing my HTML website,
I could search online for many examples and tutorials on how specific tags and attributes work,
however for WordPress, it was very difficult to find information about how to make a normal styled website.
Nearly all tutorials and videos I found while researching
used either one or more plugins based around helping easy website formatting.
I, unfortunately, did not have access to these plugins and was left struggling with the basic formatting options.
I was also restricted to the formatting options of the theme I chose.
After finding out that different themes have different options,
I was forced to choose from only a select number of themes.
I feel as though more skills are required to build a site from scratch in HTML.
Despite this I still feel as though HTML is the clear better option for someone who can be well organized,
have a creative vision, and, most importantly, is good at googling to find answers.
Even with me having no prior HTML experience, I still found it easier to write my own code in HTML by
googling tutorials than it was to format your creative vision on WordPress.
One skills that I would like to improve on is making my website fully accessible and formatted to fit mobile screens.
Zack Dominick