Thoughts on the Final Project

I came to the realization that what I intended to do with michellesopeneye.com was going to require more research, so I updated my portfolio site instead. It has been a couple years since I added new projects, and I realized that it's time to start thinking about employment.

Here is the link to my site:
www.danasprinkel.com/Portfolio_Site

This site was originally a template that I just changed the background, images, and tweaked the CSS a little. Now I am able to understand what jQuery plugins were used, and how to change them. The site was created using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML, CSS and JQuery. A couple problems I encountered: one the color overlay zoom effect on the thumbnails only worked on the first four in the set, and it took me a while to figure our why. The plugin had assigned a color id to each image, but this ended up not being specific enough when trying apply the style to more than a couple of images. Instead of using the color as the id, I ended up using the id="a.blue" and id="a.zoom". The "zoom" id was the also the CSS property used to style the overlay effect.

The rollover effect on the navigation turned out to work a lot better with JQuery. Dreamweaver will do the rollover effect for you, but you end up with a lot of messy code. Another issue I ran into was with the fancy title layover at the bottom of the lightbox images. The problem was that it was bleeding into the portfolio image. I was able to fix the problem by adding some padding to the bottom. Getting the arrows and the bullets positioned correctly on the slider required finessing the CSS, as well as the spending some time adjusting the images in Illustrator.

Since this site is going to be my portfolio site, I would still like to fine-tune it a little more. For example, I would like to add better descriptions of the work, and I would like to include more web projects when I have more to add. Overall the site meets my expectations. If I had to do something differently, I would not have spent so much time on the overlay effect. Instead I would have tried something else, since figuring out that one issue ate up a lot of time. Honestly I think I was more frustrated at not getting it earlier, because it really ended up being a rather simple solution.