07.22.06
Website by pet Artist, Adobe Go Live
Or, Web design for laypersons
The idea of making my own website appealed to me for several reasons. I wanted to showcase my pet and horse portraits; I wanted to do something original and to control how it looked; I was comfortable using computers; and I didn’t have the money to pay a pro webmaster.
Being familiar with other Adobe products, I chose GoLive5 as my website-building application. GoLive is a fully-featured site-building application which functions through visual page layout and also through source code (”html”) editing. The operator does not have to know html coding because the program writes the code for you.
I assumed that learning GoLive would be fairly simple. Boy was I wrong! Many things are not intuitive in GoLive, the interface was nothing like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, and I had to learn to think in 3 dimensions instead of only two. Plus, the manual was 900+ pages and decidedly NOT novice-user friendly.
So I attended a couple of web design seminars, then I found help from a tutor and I learned just enough to be dangerous. First I planned out a structure or “hierarchy” of pages. I built individual pages based on a look (”theme”) which I designed. I started by building pages in Photoshop to look how I wanted them. I then made small byte size “.jpg” files (for fast loading in a browser) from these Photoshop pages for my artworks and graphics, using Photoshop’s “save-for-web” feature.
I figured out how to make “rollovers” in Photoshop Image-Ready and import them into GoLive AND GET THEM TO WORK in GoLive (should have worked automatically, don’t you think?? since Adobe produces both applications…) I used Photoshop “automated” batch processing to build some web galleries of photographs and images, and learned how to put those on my site and into “popup” windows for easy return to the “parent” page. I built “text links” and navigation “links” and “buttons.” I spent days and weeks and months.
GoLive has so many capabilities I will never learn how to use them all, and web design techniques are continually evolving as well. My site is pretty basic in functionality and it looks unique. I just keep figuring out how to do what I want to do.
So learning all this, I got my stuff onto web pages to be visually OK, then I “launched” the site (presented it to the world) in 2004.
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Connie Moses, petArtist Portraits With Pets.com and PortraitsWithHorses.com
