This summer I'm really looking forward to getting more comfortable with flash, dreamweaver, and photoshop. I'd also like to look into the fireworks and illustrator programs that were included in my dreamweaver package. The possibilities seem endless. I was thinking about making a website for my own teaching studio, but I'd like to wait until next year when I record my Masters recital and audition recordings for schools. I started out knowing pathetically little about computers at the beginning of this school year and am amazed at what I've learned.

Once I started to really use the Dreamweaver program, I began to appreciate the ease with which one can create new pages, insert images, and create links. Every once in a while it can get a little buggy, but I'm sure thats me just doing something silly. I managed to create a neat effect on my picture gallery page by creating 2 sizes of every image that I wanted to use; a thumbnail and a full size image. By placing the thumbnail on the page and linking it to the full size image, one can create much more room on the page. It's some kind of shadow box effect that I learned from watching a tutorial. By inserting html code with every image, I created the thumbnail effect as well as a neat scrolling effect. The tutorial also taught one how to easily create a title for every picture, but I opted not to utilize that particular aspect.

I decided to use a green theme for my website, because gardening and raising chickens is a hobby of mine. I also couldn't help but be inspired by the beautiful spring weather. Every image including the header are pictures that I've taken myself, this spring as well as last spring/summer. I found that selecting the photos that I wanted to use throughout my site was one of the most time consuming processes while building my site. I had to sort through thousands of photos and resize the ones I wanted to use. It has been especially difficult these last few days, because every time I step outside, something new is popping up in the garden. I have to restrain myself from taking new pictures! My garden is truly a paradise for me and I'm glad to be able to share it with the rest of the class.

I tried to make a 3 dimensional image in flash and was somewhat successful. I wanted to use an image of a flower for the design, but first I needed to extract it from the background image in photoshop. To try to get a clean outside edge, first I downloaded an extract plugin. The edge didn't turn out as clean as I would've like, but I ended up liking the small fuzzy imperfections as it seemed to lend itself to the 3D effect. I ended up using this in the intro page to my website, but still can't seemed to get it placed where I want under the title. The title "Welcome To My Garden" was made in photoshop and will conform to the browser while the flash image doesn't and I'm not sure how to fix this.