Layers

Layers are a good way for quickly and easily arranging images and information. You can simply click and drag to draw a new layer and then once it is created you can just drag its width and height to adjust the size of your layers. You can also very quickly drag and drop your layers around the page to quickly move the position of the layer within your website. The other good thing is you can convert your layers into tables to save you the hassle of spliting, merging and adjusting loads of the cells in your tables. This is easy by just going to Modify >> Covert >> Layers To Tables.



















Layout View




















Layout view is very similar to layers and most of the features are virtually the same it is just a different way to produce the same kind of finish. The layout view produces across between the layers and tables you have the ability to move and place the areas like layers but the code produced is the code for tables (

Tables

Tables can easily be created within Dreamweaver and are relatively to arrange all your information and images. These tables are very familiar to tables used in most programs such as word processing and others. With these tables in Dreamweaver you can easily change the widths , heights , and merge or split cells very quickly and easily just using the property's palette. You can also add tables inside another tables and you can do this as much as you like.

Frames

Frames are used in web design and are useful for creating navigation around websites as you can use it so that your secondary frame always stays in the same. This means you do not have to re-create the navigation for every page saving you time and effort. They are also good for creating photographic gallery's using the secondary frame as your thumbnails and the main frame for your big image and all your information about the image and anything else you want to add.

The downside to frames is that they are not very good for SEO. This means search engines such as Google will find it hard to find your page. This results in your page ranking badly on search engines and you not recieving many hits on your website.

Web Site Research

www.tnop.com

I really like the graphics and the illustrations on this website. All the graphics on the website have been really well produced with nice bright colours and clean lines making the pages stand out. I did find that at first i found the web site confusing and hard to understand as there is a lot going on in the index page which makes the site look a bit cluttered. Once i figured out where all different parts on the web site where i started to have a look around the portfolio. When there i found that the nice graphics are carried on through out the web site and has done some very nice graphics for his portfolio.


















From this website I feel I have learn't that having nice bright and clean graphics can make a web site look very good and also stand out. This is because the bright colours and clean graphics attract your eye and your attention. However this is all well and good, but also over loading a page and not making it easy to understand how to navigate the site can put visitors off and make them go else where as they want to be able to browse easily.

















www.eccentris.com

This website has been produced purely using flash. The first thing I noticed about this website is the fact that it has an intro page, but the enter here link isn't every visible. This means it is hard to find unless you read the text that it is at the bottom of. Once inside the website it is very clean and interesting. The site being built in flash means that they can have a lot more interactive things than a static html website. They developed this well by incorporating sound by making an audio player on the web site. They have also used flash to its potential by having a lot of transitions or visual movements on the page.
































Here you can see a nicely made piece of user interaction. There is a tab at the top of the page called Filters that the user can click and then more tabs appear. From there the user can chose the different tabs to change the look of the website making it more appealing to to a wider audience. This also make the site more enjoyable to look at and to view.

I think there are a few downsides to the design of this website. The main thing being I feel the actual content or reason for the website isn't very easy to find meaning people just finding the website wouldn't understand very easily what the website is about. I also think the text on the website isn't very well presented as it is a light grey on a white background making the content hard to see and tiring to read. Also making the website entirely in flash makes the website not very accessible due to the restrictions with search engines and also screen readers. I think they may have added the splash page to the website so that the search engines will be able to find the html splash page to help with this restriction.

Search Engine Optimisation

I have always been interested in S.E.O ( Search Engine Optimisation ). Today i learned a few things about website code that i did not know about before this lecture. I learned that when you are titling that you should not just put the name of the company and that you should put words in that are relevant to the website. This is because if you just put the name of the company it will only find it if you type that name but not if you searched for their products.

Also i learnt about H1 ( Heading 1 ) tags. What ever you put inside the H1 tags will be the first thing the search engines look at inside you page thats not in your keywords or description to find out what the site is about. Using your H1 tags you must have the same words in the rest of your website and in your description or keywords for the search engine to determine what your website is about.

Google

We watched a documentary about Google, on how much money they make and how much information is stored on the Google databases and severs about all the searches made on Google. I found the documentary very interesting and i think it made me think more about what I sign up to on the internet and how I feel about Google and their products.

Assuming that the documentary's information is correct and unbiased, I think that a lot of the information used to sign up to things on the internet should be kept private unless it is really needed. Also the CIA where known to take also of Google's information off there databases for their own investigations. I think rather than just taking all the information I think that if governments or other high powered organizations need to look into information like this they should work with Google to gain the information.