Summary
New Media Production was my first foray into web design. In this course, I started by hand-coding my first HTML website from scratch with limited CSS, moved on to Bootstrap, WordPress, and finally JavaScript. With the skills I have acquired, I am confident I could create a professional website for a client or for myself.
The hand-coded HTML website was our first project. It is a responsive, fully custom HTML/CSS website, the first of my creation. Before this project, I had no experience in web design other than playing with Weebly in elementary school, a far cry away.
My first foray into Bootstrap. While the Bootstrap templates certainly made creating a website simpler and gave my website greater functionality, I preferred the customizability of putting together different Bootstrap components rather than using a template.
My first WordPress website. I learned a great deal about working with WordPress themes, plugins, and categories, and I am confident I could make one for a client and transfer ownership to them.
Working with JavaScript was both frustrating and liberating. It was frustrating in that the littlest thing could derail the entire project; it was liberating in that I could finally control what my websites did and add custom functions to them. While not the most practical example, the JavaScript Challenges were a prototype for a more advanced art tutorial website. (The password is tylerfan.)
Creating my own Choose Your Own Adventure game was my favorite and most difficult project of the semester. It really pushed me to learn a lot about JavaScript, especially event listeners, targeting HTML with JS, changing CSS with JS, and JS objects. The core structure of the game uses an array of “scenario” objects; each object had several properties, including an “options” array. The game uses a function to display a scenario and find the “next scenario” property based on which option the player chooses. Beyond that, there are several more functions that make it a proper game beyond being a simple text adventure; there is hidden text, deadly poisons, items, magic, and more that the player can discover.