0. Conception

From the outset, designing this website caused greater trepedation than the notion of the design and modeling aspects of this class. Though I've explored the rudiments of HTML before through sites like Code Academy, and have on very few occasions worked in the command line to modify existing websites, my skill level could only be classified as "emergent" (a polite word from the education field for "terrible").

Ideally speaking, I very much wanted my website to be a well-organized, semi-tutorial resource for anyone who stumbled upon it. Too much content on the internet seems to be geared to inspire the reaction "Wow!" without every answering the corollary exclaimation "How did they make that?!" Of course, there are tons of DIY and craftsman websites which do explain these processes (and I should explore these more for inspiration), but the one I stumble on frequently is reddit's Something I Made subreddit. Imgur galleries are the oft-used method, which are limited in their formatting to text+photo galleries - which are certainly powerful enough, but I wonder if there are other more compact methods of communicating information, especially organizing it in something besides an endless gallery/website.

One thought is to break down the website into convenient navigation toolbars - allowing users to switch between projects easily, explore similar projects, and a way to jump ahead to the methods which interest them while skipping the parts they already know. Additionally, some attempt to generalize the methods used, so that someone could walk away from the page not just understanding how to make the specific thing I made, but how they could apply that knowledge to their own projects. I am thinking this could be accomplished by another section of the page which highlights techniques, materials used, general principles, and (in the case of design software) commands and functions used.

This will necessarily be an evolving process, and I hope to go back and update my pages as I improve my own HTML handling and design. A final key apsect of this "website design" metaproject is that I want to document my own experience improving the design of the page and my own skill with programming, and so I will not rely on templates except for inspiration - I will code everything myself (with the possible exception of using jquery, if I ever get that far...). I would like to exceed the mere acheivement of a functional, useful, and organized website, into that very terrain that makes people say "Wow! How did he make that?!"

That said, I've got a long way to go. Go to first attempts, 1. Exporting office files.