About my course

Posted on: October 3, 2008 | Filed in: University
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Some of you may know that I am now studying with the Open University, a university dedicated to distance learning. I am currently on the Web applications: design, development and management course. I hope to study and complete other courses required to gain a Certifcate in Web Applications Development. My course started a couple of days ago.

The current course is going well so far. Most of the topics covered I have knowledge of and find that I am progressing through the study guides quickly. I hope that in future courses there will be more of a challenge, though this course is great for getting me back into the habit of studying. I will feel like I have achieved so much more than going to college if I gain the qualification. The reason why is in order to do a distance learning course, a person needs to have extra dedication and self-discipline. With this being a distance learning course, I will need much more motivation than when I went to college. There is no lecturer to give me lessons or badger me to get my assignments in. I need to do this for myself. There are support forums and a weekly seminar based on a certain topic, but most of the hard work needs to come from the student - me. I am enjoying studying so far and hope to continue enjoying it, regardless.

It is an odd feeling being a student again. Last time I was a student was back in 2004. I studied an AVCE (Advanced GNVQ) in ICT, which was okay but not exactly enjoyable. I hope to be more successful as a student this time around. I had a hard time the last year of college due to personal problems and didn’t get the best grade I could have achieved. Now I am settled and in a better state of mind, I feel I will do better. I also think I will be more successful this time around because the subject matter is more to my liking - web design.

I will be sure to let you all know of my progress through this blog. I hope that I won’t bore you with my ramblings about studying, but it is an important part of my life right now. :)

New site design: Cherry

Posted on: October 1, 2008 | Filed in: Web Design
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I have been a busy little bee and managed to complete the new site design a bit earlier than expected. Here I present to you “Cherry”. Creative name, eh? This design is to celebrate the upcoming first birthday of Cherry Pip (October 17th). It is a dramatic change from the previous design. I always like to surprise people. This design took around 2 weeks to make. I did not use pink because it is Pink for October/Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I totally forgot about it. It’s just a coincidence.

I have made the following revisions regarding my coding:

  • Converted padding and margins from pixels (px) to em
  • Converted fonts from a mix of percentages and em to all percentages
  • Used more CSS shorthand
  • Included an extra stylesheet to fix minor Internet Explorer bugs

Some bugs I am working on getting fixed:

  • Content margin issue in Internet Explorer 6 (surprise, surprise)
  • Search box padding issue in Opera
  • Transparent PNGs not transparent in Internet Explorer 6

I am very pleased with how this has turned out. It reminds me of some old layouts of mine but with reliable, cleaner coding and better images. Any feedback and bug reports are welcome. Let me know what you think. :)