When we started the section on web or UI design and all I had in my belt was an hour and a half of HTML and CSS practice I feared that I would suffer and slave over piddling around pixel by pixel. That was honestly the most obnoxious part, I can’t tell you how much time I could waste just getting one little thing right because I notice it seems to be off by a few pixels then when I change it I always felt like I made it worse. I often found myself referring to my past code when it came to the homework however the quiz wasn’t all that difficult. The sites that I created for both the homework and quizzes weren’t too complicated but I don’t think, unless you spend hours on end, that you can create good looking sites with just HTML and CSS. The amount of time that it would take to get the job done would be ridiculous. That’s the exact reason why we ended up learning Semantic UI, which turned out to be better than I expected.
I’ll have to admit, I got off to the wrong foot learning Semantic UI. I was reluctant to watch the two or so hours of content but in hindsight I’m glad I did. It took me a while to get started on them but once I did it all sort of fell into place. Now granted, I did have my struggles with it. I had to make a webpage based off of an already existing company’s site and I chose Apple. I thought that it would be a good enough challenge but I soon realized I bit off more than I could chew. I struggled with some spacing, background, and image sizing. I definitely should have given myself more time to work on that but I overestimated my abilities. All in all I capped off the Semantic UI with a finished WOD and feeling better than I did during the Apple site attempt. Some of my struggles could be blamed on reading the documentation for Semantic UI. The site that they have for it is rather confusing and does miss some key details that you would hope would be there in a pinch but personally I have yet to find the answers I needed from it, both while I was doing the WOD and the Apple site. Going back to the videos would have probably been a better decision when it came down to it but there’s no way I’m digging through that site when I’m strapped on time during a WOD. For as many woes as I experienced with Semantic UI I can’t imagine trying to create what I did with just HTML and CSS and it sure gets the job done.
The quick-teaching method was somewhat helpful but I’m glad I at least had some background knowledge of CSS and HTML when I was messing around with simple websites at work. I learned it through doing some PHP and database work. Having that kind of a head start helps a bunch especially when it comes down to getting the little nuances of each language like using the pointy brackets and slashes to end things. I didn’t have as much CSS knowledge so that did have to be learned naturally. All in all these methods of creating sites will be helpful in the future for this class I’m sure and I’m glad I’ve built this nice baseline I can work off of. Creating a good base is important in any language and these ones are no exception.