reflections

Work Completed

• Finish Creating PHP Objects
• Begin Styling

Summary

I was able to finish creating the objects used as the backbone of the system. Currently, the site is functional, although not very usable. My task now is to make it look good.

The good thing is that, because of the way it was designed and written, all of the code used in creating EatOurFood.com is HTML 4.01 Transitional valid. While that may not mean much to most people, the upshot of it all is that the code will be very easy to style; one Cascading Style Sheet should do the trick. This is a definite advantage to hand-coding everything, as I've done, rather than using a tool such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, which often outputs bad code.

As I'm getting into the styling, and trying to figure out color scheme and usability, I'm reminded of what Kapor says about design bringing together "the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes." In making this look good, I cannot simply choose what I think is a technically impressive method of presentation, but rather I must keep the human users in mind, and create a usable and accessible method of presentation.

Work On Tap

• Finish Styling
• Bug Squashing

References

Chapter 1 in Winograd, T. (Ed.). (1996). Bringing design to software. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.