My Website

Here is the web address for my page: http://www.shingdady.com/

DIG 315 Week 5 In Review

This week I have my Front Page Website all storyboarded out. The website itself will be dedicated to my family. It will revolve mainly around the boys and their exploits, but will also include pages about me and my hobbies, etc. The idea is that any one of our friends and families will be able to visit the site and catch up on how the boys are growing and what they are into. Also, I update a newsletter page which will be very satirical in nature and hopefully will add some good humor to the site. I have been looking at the freewebs and also am considering hosting my own domain and the biggest difference in what I have found is that there is much more flexibility for the "amateur" web designer on the hosting sites than in Front Page. I am looking into grabbing some free software to add to my Front Page site, so that I can add a blog, but at this point, I'm not sure how easy it will be to insert it in. I will be doing more reading and research so I can figure it out. Microsoft has some good tutorials and also on b2evolution.net, I found some good info and feedback on web hosting and design and they also have a kick butt 2.0 blog software program. I am on revision 4,080 on my storyboards and website, so I know the rest of the week will be the same. Yea, snow, more time for me to play.

Paul Shingleton

DIG 315 Week 4 In Review

Wow, I have become quite the critic when it comes to viewing websites. Let's start with 2 near and dear to my heart. The 1 st would be a site I created using my web space on Verizon. I used one of their templates and just uploaded pictures and some text and let them do all the work. I put it together about 3 years ago and at the time I was pretty happy about it. I just looked at it this past week for the 1st time in about 2 years and it was awful.

The text was hard to follow due to poor color choices and sizes. The links didn't necessarily tell exactly where you were headed and a couple went nowhere. The color combinations on the backgrounds and the text under the pictures sometimes oveshadowed the pics. The whole reason I put it together was to share pics with family and friends and I can see why no one spent much if any time there. I chose a poor title for the site. It was funny to me and a couple of other people that I know, but most people would look at it and say, "what?" I would pass right by it, if it wasn't mine. The goal of the site was to share family pics and info, but like I said, anyone coming across it including people that know us wouldn't be sure they were at the right place. Poor template design combined with my lack of knowledge of proper design and it was a disaster. My new one will be much better.

The 2nd site that I built was my MySpace page. I started out not knowing much html or other code, so I was kind of stuck with what I could find. It was very hard to read and follow and was not very pleasing to the eye. Dark background with bold-faced dark fonts, not very appealing at all. Also, I had the background picture following you as you scrolled which made it even more distracting and hard to read and follow. The goal of the page was kind of hard to determine, but you could if you looked hard enough. Now it is improved. Not up to par yet, but much more contrast in colors and fonts between background and text and pics. I took a template I found and have started tweaking it with what I have learned in html and it is improving.

I think it is great that anyone can sit down at a computer and make their own website. It gives you the freedom to show who you are and promote your own business or views or artistic ability. Of course in the wrong hands, it can be dangerous and hurtful. A great majority of what is on the web is junk. Poorly designed, no true goal of content or only out to shake someone down for money. I like that I can go online run a search and find someone in Israel or Thailand or Tibet who likes the same music I do and we can connect and share common thoughts. Very cool. It would be redundant of me to talk about the drawbacks to this freedom, because it is well known that the internet can be a very dangerous place also. It is the freedom of it all that draws me in.

Paul Shingleton

DIG 315 Week 3 In Review

This week was another good week. I thoroughly enjoyed the newsletter and the HTML lab, while a little tedious at times was very good. It makes it even easier to change around my MySpace page.
The website evaluation articles gave me a lot to think about. There is so much information floating around out there on any given subject and most of it is either outright untrue or purely opinionated depending on the author's point of view. That is OK if you are looking for other people's views or it is just for purely entertainment. If you are looking for facts or educational material, it is very important that you evaluate the websites with a critical.
Determining the purpose of the author's intent and if the information is purely opinion or if there are facts behind it is probably the most important for me. I chose 2 sites on the Mayan Calendar and the Doomsday Prophecies behind the end of it in 2012. They were: http://www.armageddononline.org/2012.php and http://www.michielb.nl/maya/

The first one I found to be interesting and filled with lots of information regarding 2012, not just Mayan, but other prophecies as well. It all has to be taken with a grain of salt, which the author does most of the time. There was a a lot of factual information and a lot of what I would consider to be straight entertainment, but I felt like it was easy to differentiate between the two.

The second one contained factual information about the Mayan Civilization and I found it to be more educational based. I believe it was a project for a college student and was structured in more of an educational format. I have a pretty extensive knowledge of the Mayan Civilization and found the material to be true and could also easily be checked on educational databases.

Overall, another great week. I already was critical of websites, so this did not change the way I view them, but it may enhance the way I view them going forward.

Paul Shingleton

DIG 315 Week 2 In Review

This week was fun for me. I had used Photoshop here and there, mainly to edit pics for evil purposes, i.e. making fun of one of my friends. I learned some new tricks both in class and from the websites. This something I am going to have even more fun with and it is coming in handy for my newsletter. Which, by the way is much easier in Publisher than word. I have included an example of Photoshop work.

I used some cropping and magnetic lasso and feathering. All pics were taken by myself or other friends, so no copyright infringements, it was actually pretty easy to do after about 54 tries. Looking forward to this week and getting into HTML.

Paul Shingleton

DIG 315 Week One in Review

This first week made me look at a lot of things differently. 1st off, "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" should be "A Few Good, A Lot of Bad and Way More Ugly Than Should Be Allowed". I never really gave it much thought and I am the furthest thing from a professional, but so many of these adds, etc. could be so much better with just a few basic changes.
Now that I am looking at these with critical eye, it makes me realize how many of these that I definitely would have skipped over because they didn't grab my eye or were just too difficult to read quickly. Some of the ugly just needed to have better alignment or contrast and they would have moved right to the good, also I was surprised to see how many needed just font changes to make them better.
If more business owners just learned the basics of Graphic Design, I believe they would be pleasantly surprised by the increase of business they would see.

Paul Shingleton

First Post

Here is my first post. This class will be fun.