Part of the assignment was to write a formal report about how I created the website applying professional standards and format for industry.
I started to write it in Adobe InDesign CS6 and after 17 pages, I decided to use different software because quality of the used images was so bad that you could not see it.
I used simple Microsoft Word for it and quality of the images was great. I wrote full formal report in this software.
I did usability testing while designing the site so I did a few correction to the design. I got positive feedback from people that were testing it so I am happy about it. Everything is working perfectly fine on the site considering it is a dynamic site.
The only negative feedback I got was that it is not a responsive/adaptive designed. The reason for it is that I did not have enough of time to do it as I had to work on other projects. I am aware of it thought and if I have spare time in the future, I will make it responsive or adaptive.
This site is missing CMS (Content Management System) to allow users to add, delete and edit content of the site. PhpMyAdmin would not be needed anymore after adding CMS. Another thing that could improve whole site would be contact form which would allow users to contact author of the site straight from the site.
Over all, I am happy about this website, design is very nice and the fact that it is my first fully dynamic site makes it even better.
Browsers
This site works in
Another good point that were made while user testing was that photos were too big after opening. This would make big problem on tablets. I checked size of them and they were way too big. I did little research about the right size of photos on websites and I found out that it suppose to be 800px and no more than 150kb.
I opened them in Adobe Photoshop CS6 and set them up to this size.
The result was seen straight away. Not only size of full folder went lower but also size of photos were better and worked fine with tablets.
All changes were made after user testing. Symmetry plays big role in designing websites and I must say that it looks better after changes were made. I also created ‘split screen’ in home page by dividing left and right side of the site which creates a perfect symmetry –
This is how the site looks at the moment –
Home page
Gallery page
When the site was designed and everything worked perfectly fine, I did user testing. I got positive feedback however, there were a few things that I didn’t notice.
1. Moving text to the left so it’s all in one line – symmetry
2. Making ‘selection’ function as big as rest of the windows
The search is set up to ‘wild card’ which means that you can type only a few letters from any word and if there’s any word in table that consists of typed letters, it’ll pull it out from table and deliver to the site.
PHP and MySQL is working perfectly fine and my job now is to create design of the site. I already did my research, wire frames and mock up so I know exactly how it is going to look like. I need to customize it with CSS.
At the beginning, I wanted to use ‘carbon fibre background’ as it has very professional and elegant look but while I was going through photos that I was going to use, I noticed vintage style picture hanging on the wall and this gave me an idea to create a vintage looking website.
I typed into Google ‘black vintage background’ because I already knew that colour scheme is going to be black/white or grey as it fits perfectly with colours of photos; did a little research about it and found perfect background that downloaded from www.pixeden.com. It is called dark-planingwood.
Fonts
I typed into Google ‘google fonts’ and chosen the right style of font for header. It is called ‘Oleo Script cursive’ which if you have a look closer, is exactly the same as one of the writing on the picture that I took.
Another font that I used for text is called ‘Open Sans Condensed’. The reason for that is that I needed to make it readable and font used for header wasn’t very readable with large text. This font still has a vintage look and it is readable.
Every time you work with tables, you need to make sure you back them up just in case they get deleted for some reason.
Step 1 – connect to database with phpMyAdmin
Step 2 – select the table you want to back up
Step 3 – click ‘Export’
Step 4 – choose different formats you want table export to
Step 5 – save it to folder called ‘SQL’
On ‘index.php’ I decided to have random generated photos from table. The reason for it is that while doing my research I found out that most of the websites used it as some kind of form of introduction to the site, showing users what they can find on the site.
First of all, I needed to create another table in phpMyAdmin. I named it ‘RandomPics‘. It consists of two columns ‘RandPicID’ and ‘pics’. I didn’t need anything else for that.
It was the same code that I used for gallery page with a little change. Instead of 
I’ve chosen new created table for random photos and the code you see above tells it to choose random photos from table. ‘LIMIT 1’ tells it to choose only one photo at the time, you can change it to any number you want and it’ll add more photos. I’ve chosen only one photo at the time.
Then simply echo it out.
I came across to little problem while doing it as I echo out only like this 
which didn’t work. It only pulled out path of the photos. I know now that it was mistake and I sorted it out by pulling it out by ‘img src’.
Photos randomly changes after refreshing page.
Veronika Lesnakova 