None of my work from the Website Coding class is very spectacular. However, I wanted to include its final project because that class was my first experience with any coding (except for an extremely simple website from the final week of Intro to Software).
History
Back in the first half of high school, I still had no idea what career I wanted to pursue. Math and logic were my favorite subjects, but jobs that involve a repetitive use of formulas didn't entice me. Taking NWTC's career quiz returned plenty of options, and IT was one of the highest results. The main reason I chose software development is that it seemed like a balanced blend of math and logic without leaning too heavily on one or the other.
However, I still needed to see if I would enjoy coding, so I took Website Coding during junior year of high school. Obviously, I stuck with coding, but I just mentioned that software development is what I pursued, so how does this final project even exist if this is a web development class? Well, I was going to transfer to UWO for a bachelor's in software. After working at my internship for the Career Experience class, though, I discovered that software developers work as much with the web as they do software. Therefore, I'm getting a second associate's here at NWTC in Web Development, and this project is being created in my last few weeks of the degree.
Experience
Looking back at the Website Coding final project, I can definitely tell it was my first time coding. Notepad was the editor I used; partially because of that and partially because I thought it looked better, I put all properties assigned to a CSS selector on one line. Something else related to this is that most of my HTML is lacking indents. One thing I remember not understanding at the time is why CSS needed to be separated into a different file, and to be fair, it didn't really need to be in building a website of that size. Obviously, I didn't know how much CSS gets re-used and how large web apps can get.
Something else I definitely didn't understand is how problematic large hardcoded sizes can be. A margin-left of 260px on my main element in order to give the nav enough room in the left column would definitely not scale down to a phone screen. Besides all of my flaws at the time, I see one design concept that I still use, even in this project: radial-gradient behind a transparent wrapper. These days, I use much more subtle colors and transparency so that you can't really tell the gradient is there. I'm trying to provide a better visual experience than flat colors on the more subconscious level.