Activity 3.5

See postcards from the Red Centre

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What I have learned: In choosing the font I like Sand but had used it for the previous exercise. I liked Papyrus a lot but then realised Peter had got in first so settled for Comic Sans, Italic. It is informal, very readable which is important for the labels, and does not detract from the images that are the point of the page. I found FW has a useful feature showing the font in a larger size than the pulldown menu.

I am trying to learn PS so it was interesting to see what FW can do in comparison with PS/ImageReady. It was no problem to reduce the image size of small images to 4~8k and the final jpgs to 144~146k. The quality is quite acceptable on screen and probably could have been smaller, though would be rather low quality if printed to any size. I reduced the composite jpg to a small gif to use as a button (above) and it is only 7k. so quite friendly and more appealing than a text link. All the pages load at an acceptable speed, even on my 24~28k line. Tested on 4 browsers on a Mac and feedback sought from PC users as I have no access at present.

Rather than create my own buttons I decided to experiment with an on-line generator and used buttongenerator.com. (their icon is irritating but a condition of use - I reduced the size to about 25% though could have used a static screen capture). I also found the easiest way to size the popup windows was to make them oversize, then, using an on-screen ruler (FreeRuler for Mac) decide on the exact size to enter in behaviours.

I probably should have asked to do this exercise using my own images which I could then have actually used later in other contexts.