sliders

For the workshop on sliders I chose the ‘anything’ slider to try out. I used the example set up and changed all the pictures and colours. I opened up each picture in Photoshop, chose some different ones and placed them over the top of the original ones so that they would be the correct size for the slider, and then re saved them but keeping the same name. I then went into the slider css file and changed the colours of the tabs and borders. The other information you need to copy over into your file is the javascript into the JS folder and the css style sheet for the slider. The script code for the slider should be put in the head section of your site.

Forum workshop

Forums

If you were to put a forum on your site you would firstly have to consider security. The second thing you would have to take into account would be whether the theme would suite your site and be editable, the price and the amount of time it would take to moderate.

The one I decided to look at in class was ‘Vanilla’ which had some free forums to try which were very simple to add to a web page. I downloaded the free forum styles, but here used one which only involved copying some code and pasting it to my page.

I also tried PunBB in class. I downloaded the source files from punbb.org, unzipped the software, and put the SpinkBB css into the folders.

I then tried putting different widgets into the page which was also very straight forward. I went to widgetbox. There are so many that you can customise to fit in with your site, changing the size, colours etc.For one of these I chose the subject matter, ‘Natural Cleaning tips’ to fit in with the website I had chosen to do, and the other I could also choose the subject, ‘Cleaning tip of the day’. The Google search menu bars were also straight forward to add.

Dreamweaver Spry

I tried out the spry accordion in Dreamweaver, which was easy to follow and change colours and sizes in the css. The tabs, tab panels,collapsable menu and menu bar, all worked in the same way.

Flash

We spent one class concentrating on Flash which seemed much easier to get the hang of than Dreamweaver. I could imagine that if you had the time to spend you could produce some interesting things. I was doing quite well in class until I lost everything having not remembered to save! Should have learnt that by now!