The way that I approached this project, as far as methodology goes, was to create design documents within the first two days of the project timeline, to figure out what direction I wanted to take with this site. For me, having design documents completed early on in the process helps me gather my thoughts, and figure out what the different elements of the project are, defining the scope of the work. Once I have a better idea of the elements I want to include, I can figure out how long each task will take, and create a project timeline.
To keep myself on track for this project, I broke up the different steps necessary for development of the site and marked down different deadlines for myself in my calandar. As I mentioned before, I created a short deadline for my design documents because that helped me visualize my project and figure out what I needed to learn in order to acheive the goals that I had set for myself.
The first thing that I did to start creating this project was to make the navigation bar. Using the resources that I have listed in the research section, I learned how to align items and how to sort divs to create a navigation that spans across the top of the page, with elements spaces evenly. I thought this would look better than a right-justified navigation bar because the pages are not very busy to begin with, and this would also allow me to increase navigation font size, making the page a little more accessible.
I then moved on to fill in body content for each of the pages, copying and pasting the navigation code at the top of each page. I linked all of my design documents in the planning page first, then started typing up the tools page to list all the resources I used to create my design documents. Then, I started writing about the research process for this project, making sure to link to the different sites that I drew from to develop my knowledge. Then, I filled in this methods page, describing the processes that I was using to create this site.
Before creating my mistakes page, I wanted to get into some of the CSS of the site. So, I styled the text, links, headers, and so on. I worked on formatting my planning page, and adding text to give quick descriptions of each design document. This proved to be quite difficult for me, so I ended up leaving images on the left side of the page, and text on the right with padding around the body content. I sized images in two groups based on their overall shape, and what I thought would look best using the img tag and a class funciton.
Lastly, I went through and wrote up my mistakes page, to reflect upon what I had to fix, and what could have possibly been done differently and i worked on the final design touch-ups, such as trying to play around with more formatting in the Planning page and figuring out where I could add more color to the site to make it more visually interesting.