Design No. 3

I quite like this, I still havent asked my client's opinion on this layout yet. But i have to say, I love this. I think Im getting better

Grunge Designs

 A sudden act of proscatination allowed me to find this website. Very inspiring website
http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/30-beautiful-examples-of-grunge-in-web-design/

However, I was quickly brought back to earth when I realized that I didnt know how to make a grungy looking background as I had never done one before

Email and Design no. 2

First of all, I sent an email today to my aunt Heidi, a freelance programmer from Toronto. I seem to remember during my visit to Toronto last year that she and her husband has quite a large number of PHP and MySQL books, as well as Java.



Also, I created another web design, based on the stuff from my previous journal. I asked my father to give me some feedback and he said that it was quite good. However, the links did not stand out enough. They had the same blue as the background. Before he saw this, at dinner, I mentioned a sky blue webpage and he said that history subjects tended to have dark, drab colours. Therefore, my next web design will be green/brown. He said the main background was okay though, so I may keep the gradient. Also, I like the posistioning of the search bar here.

More design work

After discovering from my client that history rarely had sharp bright colours like that orange I used previously. So back to the drawing board i went.

From this website, i saw several appealing designs.
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/60-high-quality-free-web-templates-and-layouts/



After looking all these designs, I realized that this gradient from top to bottom really appealed to me, and I'm sure that it would appeal to most people too. Also, there are quite a few pale colours here. Therefore, the next layout i try to do will have a pale colour scheme with a gradient going from top to bottom

Seeking Professional Help

Well, for the search engine, I was completely run dry of ideas. So I decided to seek professional help from my father/client's technician

From: Roy Yiu (HIS)
Sent: 2011年11月7日 18:40
To: Cheung Sui Wai (HIS)
Subject: RE: Question

Dear Prof. Cheung,

I am not familiar with this. As I know, to construct a searching engine, you need to use a database server(e.g. mysql, ms sql…) for its backend and you may use any computing language(s), (e.g. php, aspx….) for querying and displaying the searching result(s) to the user (i.e. the front-end).

You may imagine that:

1. some particular information of a webpage, like Page title, Domain Name, Page description, Keywords…., will be collected and stored into a database. To store what kind of information will affect the accuracy and searching rate.

2. one makes a request to search “something” from the searching engine webpage (front-end). The request will be sent to the database server for processing. The searching result will be sent to the front-end webpage for displaying.

Yes, in fact, you may copy and paste the webpage information into the database for searching! However, it works but it is not efficient. Certainly, there are some API for searching, e.g.

http://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/docs/dev_guide.html

Regards,

Roy

From: Cheung Sui Wai (HIS)
Sent: Monday, November 07, 2011 5:04 PM
To: Roy Yiu (HIS)
Subject: RE: Question

Dear Roy,

Do you have any idea?

With thanks,

Sui-wai

From: Cheung Sui Wai (HIS)
Sent: 2011年11月5日 20:51
To: Roy Yiu (HIS)
Subject: FW: Question

Dear Roy,

This is a question from my daughter Laura. Could you tell her answers?

With thanks, from

Sui-wai

From: laura cheung [mailto:laura001_hk@yahoo.com]
Sent: 2011年11月5日 20:32
To: Cheung Sui Wai (HIS)
Subject: Question

I would like to ask how one would make a search engine that would search through an entire website. I do not understand how it works. Would it be through usage of PHP and MySQL? Or would it be through Javascript? Also, how does it work? Does it copy and paste content into a database and then search through that? Or is there a function/plug in that allows searching through an entire website? Thank you in advance.

Anyway, this proved to be useless since Roy (the technician) seemed to know little about web programming and the information he gave me was more about how it worked (eg. search engine searches things) but not more in depth information on MySQL.

So I decided, next, to try seeking help from my aunt, a freelance programmer from toronto. Thankfully my client (my aunt's brother) gave me her email at my request.

Javascript Validation

This lesson I worked on creating textboxes for the comments and checking if things were all filled in. I first looked at this website.
http://www.php-mysql-tutorial.com/wikis/php-tutorial/creating-a-guestbook-using-php-and-mysql.aspx

I spent a lot of time attempting to figure out what was wrong with the code since it wouldnt work. In the end, the code was too complex and I ended up deleting many essential things.  In the end, i ended up writing my own, but the experience from my previous attempts helped me a lot. I created fields for both names and comments.

However, my checking the validation still did not work. After a lot of puzzling and trialling and erroring, i finally found this site

http://www.tizag.com/javascriptT/javascript-getelementbyid.php

This allowed me to confirm that setting a variable to an html id was actually possible. Also, it told me what i was doing wrong. I had used " instead of '
After fixing this, it was all perfect.

Colour Scheme Inspiration

To improve my website design, i decided to look at some colour combinations and designs.

Colour Combinations
http://www.colorcombos.com/

http://www.colorschemer.com/schemes/
http://designshack.net/articles/inspiration/25-awesome-tools-for-choosing-a-website-color-scheme
http://www.colorsontheweb.com/colorwizard.asp






This website
http://www.inspiredm.com/colour-schemes/ inspired me to make a series of web designs and thus gain experience and choosing what i like best from them

I asked my client what he thought of my version and he told me that he liked it but history websites tended not to have bright flashy colours like orange i used. Instead, the blue and green worked a lot better