Week 8: Imagery

This week we are reading chapters 15 and 16 in MacDonald's text.

Chapter 15: "Fancy Buttons and Menus." Menus are very important elements of web design--they help with navigation and make connecting sites possible. Last week's chapter on JavaScript was great, too. In my web design project, I use a menu that uses Java. This chapter offers more information about that. Particularly useful in this chapter's discussion starts on page 458 and presents how to make rollover buttons in Dreamweaver. There's also a great discussion of "Do it Yourself Collapsible Menus" (p. 460). Also great is the discussion of third party menus (p. 464). This is what I used for my menu.

Chapter 16: Audio and Video

Audio and video seem complex, but MacDonald makes them approachable in this chapter. Embedding!!! I embedded a youtube video in my site (it was a video I participated in as an undergraduate as a part of a preservation course).

MacDonald presents sound options for websites, like continuous playing background music. I think this might be tacky on many sites, but effective on music related or promotional sites. It all depends on what the site's purpose is!


As discussed in the last post, it is really important that web designers consider copyright and ownership when using images. There are several sites that offer free images as long as they are used within the intended guidelines and credit is given. On my web design project, I used images from http://sxc.hu. This site has istockphoto (pay for images) on the top of the search, but then there are free images below that; as long as you use them within the guidelines and give recognition, it's OK. On my site, I give the web address and recognition on the "reflections" page.

I used Photoshop to edit the images to make them smaller so that page load time would be shorter. This is a tool that is essential for web design! Adobe products (Dreamweaver, Photoshop) are basically awesome. Sometimes they can be hard to use, but once you get the hang of it it's great. I will admit that I referred to Dreamweaver as "Nightmareweaver" several times throughout the course of this class and web project because sometimes it got really frustrating, but overall it is a great tool that I will definitely consider and continue to utilize in the future.

Weekly website reviews:

Website 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources

This site took a really long time to load on my computer, and then actually didn't load. Maybe the image sizes are too big? :)

Website 2: http://www.libraryspot.com/images.htm

This is a great, great site!!! Not only for web design. I think this site would be great for librarians to know about when helping kids with school projects. For example, if a kid needs a picture of Benjamin Franklin, this site has links to the Library of Congress image sites! Absolutely a great resource. Not overly complicated.

Website 3: http://www.readwriteweb.com/

This is an interesting site that shows the connections between popular websites and social networks. Great articles and utilizes tagging really well, so if someone is searching for something specific, it's a great site.

Website 4: http://www.footnote.com/

As a soon-to-be librarian who works in digital collections, I obviously think this site is awesome! It has historical documents!! I looked through the WWII Collection. Also I like the site's name. Clever.