Summarize and Reflect Week 5

Chapter 13 of The Non-Designers Web Design Book is filled with tips, tricks, and techniques for enhancing websites. The chapter dealt largely with using Photoshop but it did touch on Dreamweaver, HTML code, and flash animation. The readings showed how to create specialized effects which are now commonplace all over the web. Tables were discussed first. Examples of using tables for layout, nesting tables, and using a table with wrap around text were shown. Next, Photoshop tips were explained. Enhancing photos by adjusting saturation, shadows, and sharpness were covered. In addition to using Photoshop to edit images you can also use it to adjust your fonts for easier reading. This is accomplished by changing anti-aliasing methods, using duplicate layers, or even manually retouching the font. Other Photoshop methods described were image slicing for animation or layout, use of low source proxy, locking transparent pixels, rollovers, and image swaps. Rollover and image swaps are similar but differ in that in a rollover the image you are moving the pointer over changes and in an image swap you are moving the pointer over an image and it changes another image on the page. The HTML commands covered in the book provide the designer with more control over which fonts will be displayed in a browser and how to modify vertical and horizontal spacing of images. As far as forms are concerns the important thing to remember is no matter how nice the form looks it won’t work unless you write a CGI Script, which is the program that collects the data from the form and sends it where it needs to go. Finally the chapter ends with a brief overview of flash animation. Flash is great because it uses a vector format which loads quickly and starts playing before it even finishes loading. The images are sharper and cleaner. Vector images use mathematical formulas which makes the scalable so they resize correctly.