Writing for the Web: Week 3
OK, so I have totally, completely, most definitely gotten over my original idea of creating something like Ebay or an online shopping site after Jason scared me half to death when mentioning the hurdles of creating online shopping cartridges for such a website. I barely knew what the word ‘templates’ meant so I guess I aimed to high to quickly.
However, I do get it a bit more now. The fastest (and cheapest) way to realise my ’simplified’ new vision of another website project would probably be to get a pre-made website template, right? Being the web design amateur that I am, I set myself out to find a beautiful (beauty is in the eye of the beholder, remember?) , high quality, pre-made website template so that I don’t have to hire a professional web designer and pay him to make me one in order to pass this course. This is indeed great news, since I came across the prices of hiring someone from a web design firm and they were not a pretty sight I can tell you. I hope Jason understands I am only kidding. Of course, I will do this on my own. Hrrmmfff.
So off I went, on my own as promised, around the maze called World Wide Web, hunting for free, pre-made templates that will best work for the web design/project that I have in mind.
Most website templates I came across already gave the basic framework, so I suppose it is up to me to take one of those templates and make it work for my entire website. During the tutorial in Week 2 I learned that the use of templates work best if you have a bit of Dream Weaver knowledge so you can customize your template from the default set up to your personal vision.
But before I can choose a template I need an idea of what that personal vision would be. OK, I suppose I haven’t gotten over my original idea yet. A clothes shopping website. I even found templates that might work - with already pre-designed shopping cartridges. Please, please, me want to create fashion site. Below follows some examples of templates that might be usable when creating my dream web site:
Fashion Hut , Clothes Fashion Template or Fashion House
Other sites that could turn out to be very useful to me are Templatesbox , Freetemplatesonline , Free Web Design Templates Sites or andreasviklund which offer page after page of free templates for all project web designs.
One of the more comprehensive template companies out there, Best Web Templates and Design, offers 1,000s of website templates for just about any category of website, you can search their inventory and pick the template that fits your website idea best. Many of them were simply stunning designs, stylish yet simple. Unfortunately, they were not free downloads.
Furthermore, the web site Interspire offers some very nice templates for free but once again nothing that would suit my idea.
Ideas of how Dessi will pull this one off on her own:
I have no previous knowledge or experience of what would work and what would not on a website but after I did some research I found these invaluable tips: Do’s and Don’ts of Building a Website that I will use as my bible from now on when creating my master piece. Why? Because it is as though they were especially created for me. I do not like flashy websites, I like simple designs. I skip flash intros like only always, I click away the pop-ups even before they even appear, I find cluttered websites with huge colourful letters tasteless and a sore to the interest, eyes and senses, it is also a complete turn off when music starts pounding in the background and sometimes almost gives you a heart attack when it goes off without a warning. In short, my web site will be simple, fast to enter, straight to the point, no clutter, no music, no flash intros. Sometimes I feel like the web designers make flash intros for their own sake of enjoyment or for getting better grades at university than for the users entering their sites. I mean, who is interested in the intro??
Well, now my optimistic side tells me: ‘Great, that’s all you have to do then. Learn a bit of Dream Weaver, insert the template of your choice into the program, change a bit here and there on the original template, choose your page layout, add a bit of web site content, add some text here and there, insert a little bit of images, create a link
from the current page to another page on your website or to
another website and that’s it, you’re done. Voila, that simple and fast. Who mentioned blood, sweat and tears?’
On the other hand, my less optimistic side completely contradicts: ‘Help! Run away fast! This is going to turn into ‘Mission Impossible 5′ and forget about Tom Cruise being there to help you out.’
