Final Website

The final website should be online now at www.jmmoore.co.uk

After finishing my first website I was pleased with what I had achieved, if you had asked me to do it 2 months ago, I wouldn’t have known where to start. However, there are a number of technical and aesthetical changes I would like to make when my skill set improves.

First, I feel the general layout and content is quite plain and shallow. I do like clear black and white layouts, but still think it could be a bit more ‘funkier’, and hopefully I can improve this in the future, whilst adding to the content.

The photo slideshow could also be technically simpler on reflection, and still achieve the same result. Instead of using modular division, simply adding 1 to the variable each cycle, then adding a statement to say once the variable reaches a certain value, return to 0. However if I had a greater skill set I would use different code to create a control system to manually view the photographs, I did try but couldn’t get the code to work, nor did I fully understand it, so I reverted back to the one I did, even though it may not be the most efficient. Linked to this point, when I create my next website it would be better to have one separate page to handle all my JavaScript, like I have 1 page to handle all the CSS on this site, and 1 page to handle the validation JavaScript for the contact form. It does not affect the functionality of the site, but it would make the navigation of the code easier and tidier.

The contact form on the site is centralised in style but the check boxes do not line up perfectly as I would like, so next time I would probably use a table to achieve this. Also with the contact form, it sends the information entered an echo form, where I would like it to be sent to me. The validation is also pretty basic, as discussed before, and I would like to improve on that. Finally before I had validation on the form, I had a line of code that enabled the pre-rendered message in the text boxes to disappear when the user clicked in the area, so they didn’t have to manually delete it, but I couldn’t get this to work alongside the basic validation so had to leave the text areas blank. I would like to include this feature again, which I think is standard on forms nowadays, and allows another area for the designer to communicate with the user.

Overall I am very pleased though, I think it is a good, solid start which I can build on, and have learned a lot from.