week 1: principles and practices, project management (Jan 28)
assignments for this week
1. build a personal site in the class archive describing you and your final project
2. Sketch a possible final project
Building a personal website
Project management is an important part of this course.
To track progress of the weekly assignments, it is intended that we are going to build a personal website.
In the past I have built several websites but especially more content management systems for instance Joomla.
However these systems always require a database, but that can not be hosted on the Fabacademy organization, hence this choice fell off.
With my limited knowledge of html, css, I had the choice to either build a simple website with only html code and css or build a website that looks modern and contemporary.
Because I believe that websites should always have a attractive look and feel, otherwise they are not visited, I opted for the latter.
Wordpress:
My first idea was to build an online website on wordpress.com
After a while my disappointment in this experiment was growing, as user-friendly as it seemed it was not.
Another thing to realize is that in WordPress and a lot of similar prodcuts you can build a free website but then export it as HTML files is not possible or only with making payments.
Wordpress so fell off because the intention is that we host our website on the organization fabacademy and I didn't wanted to pay for it to wordpress.
note: it is impossible to delete your profile on Wordpress! I found this hard to believe but it is the truth, so My only option was to deface the website I already had built.
Reverse engineering a HTML5 template:
My second idea was to make use of online template, hundreds of them are offered on the internet which look very attractive and thing like fancy scrolling one page websites.
Make use of an existing template, however, almost never meets the needs that you want for your own website so you have to change it but that is not an easy task .
However I tried this for about a week, still wasn't fully satisfied with the result and in the end I dropped this idea too. It was too complicated and I didn't understand the underlying tehhniques used in the template well enough.
My final choice: Adobe Muse
Searching and searching for wysiwyg editor my eyes caught on Adobe Muse and this could be an very attractive option for me I realized immediately .
https://helpx.adobe.com/muse/how-to/what-is-muse.html
So yes, it is so true, learing adobe muse is so easy and very quickly you will ben able to build a beautiful website without writing a single line of code.
Even without a manual or online help everybody can build very nice looking websites with modern look and feel in navigating
I have the luck, as an employee working for the HvA, to only pay 12.50 euro a year to make use of the full range of Adobe products, Muse included.
For others you pay Adobe about 30 euros for montly licensing on their creative cloud, but than you will have the full range of all their (fantastic) products like Photshop, Illustrator and a lot more.
tools/sites investigated:
2. Sketch a possible final project
My first idea is to build what I already wanted to do for some time: a LED cube
A lot them can be viewed on youtube, I like to buid one driven by an Arduino of similar.
They occur in all kinds of complexity, 3x3x3x, 5x5x5x of even 8x8x8.
For testing I think it woulde be wise to start with a 3x3x3x cybe and maybe scale up later on.
Here a few youtube movies of what I mean with the term LED cube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mXM-oGggrM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K8i0JQzx2w&index=3&list=RDcQhBm_EgB0w