Blog 16 - Independent Component 1

LITERAL

• “I, Jaska Adoptante, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents 32 hours of work.”
• Cite your source regarding who or what article or book helped you complete the independent component. 
• I took an online course called "Intro to HTML and CSS" at Udacity. The lessons provide transcripts of the videos as well as helpful links and downloads that you'd need to complete the tasks. 
• Link to Course
• Update your hours in your Senior Project Hours link. Make sure it is clearly labeled with hours for individual sessions as well as total hours. Explain what you completed. 
• I finished the 3 lessons that the course was consisted of as well as the final project that was "assigned" to finish off said course.

INTERPRETIVE

• Defend your work and explain its significance to your project and how it demonstrates 30 hours of work. Provide evidence (photos, transcript, art work, videos, etc) of the 30 hours of work.

This is the course overview for the class I took at Udacity.

Lesson 1 Screenshots

Lesson 2 Screenshots

Lesson 3 Screenshots

Originally, the approximate time that this course would have taken is 18 hours. However, some concepts took a lot more time to grasp compared to others and required additional research. It took me 24 hours (an additional 6 from the given estimate) to complete all three lessons.

After the three lessons were completed, there was a "Final Project" where they just encouraged you to explore more of what you can now do with what they have taught you. I originally tried to make a quick homepage from scratch using a relatively new program that is a cheaper [*free*] alternative to Adobe Dreamweaver. It took at least 4 hours to get the failure of a final product on the bottom right image above. I decided to resort to an even easier alternative: templates.

I thought it would have taken at least half the time it took to code from scratch when configuring a template to suit your needs, however, poorly made templates with unclear documentation made it take just as long (basically another 4 hours). I took logos and other colour schemes from a blog that we made for a project in Junior year to use in the template. The final product is pictured below:

The final product tested on Firefox.

APPLIED

• How did the component help you understand the foundation of your topic better? Please include specific examples to illustrate this. 
• Taking this class was tailored to my original essential question which was focused on the technical aspects of web design. But, it was still useful in learning the basics of structuring and laying out websites. I especially had not realised that most sites follow a grid-like structure which makes positioning elements a lot easier when thought of in this way. Another thing I never noticed was how many tools there are available online such as templates and editors that are not limited to HTML and other codes. Being introduced to Bootstrap and Dreamweaver makes it even easier since you now know that there are helpful tools for just about anything that you want to do, especially if you are self-taught. There are even sites that provide images that test your code to ensure that you did not miss anything that could potentially crash your site at some point. As I've mentioned before, this course was too technical for what my essential question is now asking, but I believe I managed to still take away some valuable skills and experiences which I may even be able to use to inform my second answer which focuses on a programming-based design.