Rationale.....

At the beginning, when i was trying to come up with an idea for my web page, I wanted to incorporate some of the tools that I use when designing. I was sat at my desk and right beside me was a cutting mat along with a scalpel and pen, I thought this would be a relatively good idea as the mat already had perfect squares on, which I then planned to place the links + portfolio pictures on the page. On the contact page/about page I removed a few lines off the cutting mat to allow the text to be read more easily, although I feel the text becomes a little unclear as the colour of the font is abit to light, but it was meant to follow the theme of the cutting mat. The text is read pretty clearly in Illustrator but when it is imported into Fireworks it's reduced down to 72resolution. I've placed roll overs on the portfolio pages to allow my work to be view better. I found this part quite time consuming as I had to firstly re-size all my images, then copy and paste the background of the mat where the picture was going to be place, into Photoshop, then save each photo seperatly on top of the image and upload it in to Dreamweaver. I also had one other problem where one image wouldn't load up, which was later found to be the name in which it had been saved as, just the puntuation error, apparently it messes with codes. I feel that I now know the basics of Dreamweaver and Fireworks and if I was to re-make my web site I would like to have a go at using a little animation or roll overs on the text. I would aslo like to use the lightbox on the portfolio pages, I feel this would make it look a neater way to view the images. I would change my design to a simplier form, white background and thin black lines to underline and seperate the links from the images, this will make the site easy to use and navagate as i found the simplier sites have been the most effective.