The Journey of a Novice Web Designer

For the mid-term assignment, as most of you know I opted to make a website through yahoo's geocities. I thought for your enjoyment and perhaps my own reflection of the entire process, I would give a "behind the scenes tour" of my midterm assignment.

• I had this great vision of getting some photographs of myself on a dirt road in a remote location. An idea that I felt could be artsy and represent my "road" to literacy. So after some nagging and bribing I convinced by Husband to go with me up to the high desert and find a location to shoot some pictures. We ended up finding the perfect spot somewhere off of the 395. I had this perfect shot in mind of me on a dirt road, looking at a map, trying to navigate my way to literacy....sounds deep, right? But I failed to realize some things...

I am not a model nor can I pretend to be.

My husband is not a great photographer.

There is a lot of wind in the desert and holding a paper map is virtually impossible.
Here is a photo from our shoot that didn't make the final cut- Me cursing at wind and husband, while trying not to loose map to the elements.

• Once I had all of my images, I began first in Adobe photoshop. I edited most photos I used, whether they were my own or if I had "borrowed" them from another source. I struggled with finding the happy medium for messing with pictures. I may find it cool to turn my old elementary school blue and purple, but my classmates may think I am smoking something good and not view this edit as creative but as a waste of time.
  
  Here is the original photo of my elementary school

Here is what I did to it:

• The thing I struggled the most was not with the actual technology of creating a website, but the actual host/provider of the website, geocities. As most of you know, I had created an entire website, only to have it deleted by geocities in the wee hours of the morning of the day the mid-term was due. My initial website was a little fancier and I had done a lot of the html coding myself. However, due to great time restraints, my second site that I created was created mainly through using geocities page builders.
  
• Here is a link to my final product http://www.geocities.com/tortoros
  
  HOWEVER...............
  As I found out in class on Tuesday, geocities allows very MINIMAL amounts of data transfer per hour. So basically, only 2 people can view my site per hour....LAME! I guess you get what you pay for...which was nothing.
  Here is what we saw in class on Tuesday.....