Portfolio Project: Week 1

Hey all! So, it’s the end of week 1 of my portfolio project month! Here’s what I got done:

Here’s a breakdown of what I did and when:

  • At the very beginning of the week I passed my MTA Java.
  • I learned JavaScript with this course. It’s pretty good: concise, clear explanations, lots of exercises, both audio and visual resources. I’m using Udemy for both web development and SQL.
  • In the middle of the week, I took and passed my MTA HTML/CSS.
  • Then I coded the JavaScript page, though I didn’t have time to integrate the page with the rest of the site, since I was trying to find the optimal organization for pages.
  • Today, completely by accident, I realized that the mobile version of my website needs some serious reworking, so I put that into next week’s plan (below).
  • And lastly, I wrote this blog post!

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

  • I did a bunch of research and conducted a few surveys of the optimal way to organize drop-downs on a mobile website, given limited screen space.
  • I learned that to make a website read well on a phone, not only do you need to reorganize layout, you need to make everything obnoxiously big. This is why it’s important to test mobile layouts on a real phone, not just by resizing your browser window.

And here’s what’s gonna happen next week:

  • I’ll create another drop-down menu for the Skills link on the nav bar. On mobile, this will create a nested drop-down (aka, when you hover over the Skills link in the first drop-down, another will pop out on the right-hand side which displays pages for each skill I have). These individual skill pages are where I’ll be documenting my progress through this project.
  • I’ll create another page documenting my knowledge of Java, and I’ll try to learn some AJAX so I can put the actual Java app onto the site. (I don’t know how hard a goal that is, so if it’s too hard for one week, I’ll just put up screenshots for now and keep working on it in the background. But I want to set the goal, just in case I can do it.)
  • I’ll fix the mobile version of my website to make everything bigger and more readable.

That’s it for this week! I’ll have another update next Friday; stay tuned!

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