Review

I've been looking back over the texts from the class, Creating a Website: the Missing Manual and The Principles of Beautiful Web Design to try and compare them and how they present similar material. In all, I'd say that Principles focuses more the visual elements of web design (how things look in your website), and The Missing Manual focuses on the mechanical aspects.

The first chapter in Principles, "Layout and Design", talks about how to make a web page look aesthetically pleasing by the arrangement of features on the web page. It even references the the Golden Ratio, used by painters and sculptors for centuries, to achieve this end. I thought this was a nice touch. The Missing Manual discusses some of the same things in Chapter 9, such as liquid- versus fixed width formats (or proportionate vs. fixed width, as this text puts it) and columns in web pages, but it talks more about the tags needed to adjust the height and width in tables and other technical issues.

I think this technical aspect is what makes this text somewhat hard to follow. Don't get wrong, I have learned a lot from this book, the chapter on tags was especially helpful when I was first designing my web page, but the dry content makes it difficult to stay focused on reading it.

Speaking of my web page, I'm almost finished. I've decided to add an extra page combining information about me and my commentary to my website and a footer with copyright and contact information. It shouldn't be too hard to get this done by Monday.