Welcome, come on in. To your right, you'll find a fine array of very good resources for web-based design. I've done a lot of research, continue to do more, and would love to hear from you if you've found other great design sites. Please don't hesitate to email me with questions or link/article suggestions. That's why we're here!
Saturday, November 26
Where do we go from here?
We've spent a lot of time on color. That's okay, because color changes everything. I hope you've seen what an incredible difference color choices and color palettes can make, even using fairly simple stock templates. But how can you make a website truly your own? Do you have to learn CSS and HTML coding, then code your own site from scratch? Or go out and purchase a full-scale editor like Dream Weaver or Frontpage and work your way through their tutorials? Should you go to one of the dozens of template sites and start fresh from there? Well, you could. Any of those choices can lead to a beautiful custom website for you. If you are in the midst of developing your new business web presence, you will almost certainly want to use your host's best templates and creative suggestions. But we're blogging here, not web-marketing. So let's look at a simpler option for blogsite interior-decorating.
Images offer the ultimate customization. When you uploaded a picture for your Profile, you created a web element not offered anywhere else: a picture of YOU, or one representing you. As you've also seen, you can always add a picture or two to any post you create. Many Bloggers post pictures all by themselves, in a Blog version of a photo gallery. Those pictures add visual appeal to your posts, but don't change the essential look of your site. Furthermore, if you post lots and lots of pictures in your Blog, and if those pic's aren't highly compressed images, eventually your site will load so slowly that your readers will become irritable. We can't have that, now, can we?
What we need, then, are background images! Those are pictures or artistic elements that stay right where you place them, living happily with-in the base code of your website. If you followed along in the color articles, you probably noticed image URL's after the word background for some divisions in your template. If you tried to change that division's background color, but left the image in place, then you probably didn't see any difference in the way your site displayed. The reference to an image, listed after the color-choice for background, covers the base color with the picture. (If the picture is slow to load, though, you will see that division filled in with the correct color--until the image finishes loading.)
We'll take a good look at background images, then, in the next post. See you there!
Images offer the ultimate customization. When you uploaded a picture for your Profile, you created a web element not offered anywhere else: a picture of YOU, or one representing you. As you've also seen, you can always add a picture or two to any post you create. Many Bloggers post pictures all by themselves, in a Blog version of a photo gallery. Those pictures add visual appeal to your posts, but don't change the essential look of your site. Furthermore, if you post lots and lots of pictures in your Blog, and if those pic's aren't highly compressed images, eventually your site will load so slowly that your readers will become irritable. We can't have that, now, can we?
What we need, then, are background images! Those are pictures or artistic elements that stay right where you place them, living happily with-in the base code of your website. If you followed along in the color articles, you probably noticed image URL's after the word background for some divisions in your template. If you tried to change that division's background color, but left the image in place, then you probably didn't see any difference in the way your site displayed. The reference to an image, listed after the color-choice for background, covers the base color with the picture. (If the picture is slow to load, though, you will see that division filled in with the correct color--until the image finishes loading.)
We'll take a good look at background images, then, in the next post. See you there!
