Evaluation - Website

To be honest I am a disappointed with the way my website has turned out it just doesn't look like I thought or hoped it would. One of the main issues I think I have made for myself is spending more time planning and designing the home page than any other, and I think when people look at the site they will know and realise as it is so obvious more effort and designing went into it than another page. I think that if I had planned out the other pages and the ways I wanted to present the information on these pages I would have saved myself a lot of problems when designing and also got each page to a design level where I was happy with it. 

That being said I am happy with what I have learnt and can take away form this project as this was my first time hand coding a  website fully I learnt a lot on this side of the project. Coding both HTML and CSS which I really enjoyed and think will be very useful for the future, I also learnt about responsive website what makes them, how they work etc. which again will be very useful for the future. Planning and designing for a full website was also slightly different to when I last did it in a previous project. Also as mentioned above I have learnt that you need to plan all of your pages for a website and not just one otherwise it just becomes weaker and weaker as you add more pages. 

I also don't think that making as many changes as I did on the final day helped either as the changes were rushed so it could be submitted for the deadline. These changes were completely remaking the geology and wildlife page to lose the tab system and the image slider. Which I think these pages now look better but with more time could of become something I was really happy with. Whilst I know these changes needed to be made and make my website stronger I think I should have considered them and made them earlier so the pages would look a lot better now. 

Overall I am happy with my ideas for this project and what I have learnt form it such as coding, making it responsive, user testing, validating and jquery etc. However I feel that I could have made the website look a lot better in terms of layouts and structures and basically just a stronger final product. But i think making this mistake now in this project will make my next website or web based project a lot stronger. 

Validating my Website

I validated the code of my website using http://validator.w3.org/check, I put each of the html pages through the check and got a page like this one for each of the checks.  It gave me a number of error and warnings and also detailed this further down the page like this.

I then went through trying to fix the error in there code this was not difficult as the validator gave me a description of the error as well as the line number for where it was in the code. It took time to validate each of the pages and fix the errors, but at the same time it sorted out parts of the code and helped me find little errors that I otherwise wouldn't of. 

After making the changes to the code for example adding a missing close tag I revalidated each of the pages and eventually they came up green with no errors found. 

CSS - 

I also validated my CSS3 using http://csslint.net after pasting in and checking my whole CSS my results ok as seen here. 

The main issue was the 3 errors in the code so I wanted to make sure these were fixed. After going through the code and fixing the problems i rechecked the CSS and got 0 errors the warning were still there but this was mainly all around the order and the way I had written the CSS and as this was my first time hand coding the CSS completely I can take these warning forward to my next website. 

User Testing on my website

To test my website I out I did some small user testing asking 5 people 5 questions about the site, to see if they could navigate around, find information or links and also find it easy to use. 

The questions I asked were - 

• Can you find the rock types gallery ?
• Can you find the Red tailed hawk in the wildlife page? 
• Can you navigate to the wildlife page without using the standard navigation?
• Can you find the information on Erosion?
• How quickly can you navigate to the bottom of the history pages info?

I picked these questions as they tested out the pages and features of the site I wasn't sure about as well as seeing if my navigation worked and people could get round the site easily. 

The results were pretty good people could find out the information and navigate to it well and without getting lost so the basic structure of my website was working. The main issues I had was the tab feature as it did not load automatically as you click on the page this confused some people whilst answering question 1. Also the scroll boxes I had on the website did not work as well as I hoped and people found these annoying to use. 

Overall using testing was successful and gave me things to improve on before the deadline.