Work started out like any other day: I parked, the dogs started barking wildly when I came in, we watched the morning news – and I put my fit bit on Cooper the dog. He actually got me a good amount of steps, due to the fact I sit at a desk for several hours everyday and really don’t like an electronic program yelling at me for being lazy.
As per usual, Michelle and I got sick of siting inside, and are spending our afternoon working outside of her favorite Starbucks. The hard part about working with computers is that you usually have to work inside, where it is dark and you can see your screen and you have wifi. Sadly, I very much enjoy being outside, even if it is hot and humid. As long as there is sun, I’ll have a good time. So when an opportunity presents itself to do work outside (for example, sitting under an umbrella at Starbucks) we jump at the chance.
The most annoying part about working with electronics is that you can only go as far as the wifi connection. That may be true with most jobs nowadays, but graphic and web design require so many programs and different machines that can be hooked up to a laptop that your computer battery will die if its disconnected from the charger for too long.
Luckily I won’t be having that problem today, because instead of making graphics on Illustrator or Photoshop, today I’ve been practicing designing websites on WordPress with a program called Muffin. What the program lets be do is take out the process of coding and create a drag and drop setting of different functions. In school, we’re taught to hard code all information, so it has taken a bit of adjusting to using WordPress rather than coding in Dreamweaver. I’m not sure which I enjoy more. The drag and drop of WordPress definitely makes it easier, but sometimes I want to change one specific thing, and it is tricky to find that part in the hard code to edit. On the other hand, hard coding can take a long time, and instead of just several clicks to create a navigation bar, you have to go through the entire tedious process of making several “a href” and connecting them all.
I have been exploring the program Muffin by creating what I would want the website to look like for one of Michelle’s clients, Red Cedar. She has made several of their company websites, and now we have to make one for the Charlotte area. I really like what I’ve made so far. Each page has a picture from the client’s collection set as the static background, and then other pictures and paragraphs go on top and can be scrolled through. What having a static background means is the image staying the same, even when the rest of the information on the page scrolls.
This client wanted a very clean look, nothing busy. So I have used a lot of greyscale colors so that text is legible and colors are wild and distracting to the viewer.