Notes on Creating My First Website (Final Project)
The first thing that struck me about working with Dreamweaver, and the concepts behind building a website, is how similar the process is to creating a film or video using a digital non-linear editing program. I was able to use many of my existing skills, from working as a video editor, in the creation of my website. Initially, the process is highly organizational. You must take your concept and mentally visualize it, and then begin to lay down the ‘road map’ of how you will execute your vision. It is the same process in the film editing room. The concept of the film is in front of you in the form of a script and raw footage, and you have to come up with an organized method of sifting and shaping that material into an incarnation of that initial artistic concept. On the website, you have the ideas of what you want to achieve, how you want it to look, and the different content that you would like to include. I found it very helpful to breakdown each page of the site and ‘sketch’ out its look, feel, and what I though might be the specific content on the pages.
I did this breakdown for each page that I thought I might need for the end product, and then edited it down as I began to build the site, finding that many of the concepts were either repetitive or could be combined to create a stronger overall impression. Again, a very similar concept to editing a film. As the scenes in a film begin to assemble in to the complete work, you begin to see what story points are repetitive, unnecessary, or possibly stronger if combined with others.
I enjoyed the fact that, like the job of a film editor, the role of the website builder is both a technical and an artistic one. You are responsible for understanding how the software works, finding its shortcuts, realizing its limitations, and taking advantage of everything that it has to offer. At the same time, the mastery of the technical tools enables you to get closer to achieving a more precise incarnation of your original vision for the website. By no stretch of the imagination have I become, in this short amount of time, an expert at using Dreamweaver. However, I feel like I have grasped enough conceptually and technically to achieve a fairly close actualization of the website that I envisioned. I was able to include text, still images and video, both as embedded links to outside hosts like youtube.com and also as embedded flash movies that the site hosts itself. In addition, I was able to lay out the content on the site pages in the way that I initially envisioned. It is not that fancy or stylistically advanced, but being in control of creating that environment was a significant step in the process for me.
In creating an interactive experience, like a website is for a person who is visiting it, seeing the creator’s hand and vision in the experience is of significant importance. I want to feel like I am being shown these things and learning this information in this specific way for a reason. This process is identical to filmmaking. It is the role of the film director (with the actual physical execution done in the end by the editor) to guide the viewer through an experience in a specific way, aiming to achieve a feeling or understanding that they see as important. I see a website much in the same way. There should be a unifying thread within the site, that brings together all of the content to relate a concept or a representation of an idea in a consistent way. While I was not completely able to achieve the stylistic feeling that I originally envisioned for the website, I do feel that I was able to execute a very consistent base model for a site that can become more complex and fully realized in the future. It was a very rewarding experience for me to finally learn how the basics of website design work, and I will definitely continue to expand my understanding of it in the future.
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