Nanor
Well-Known Member
Was digging around through my old memory stick backups and I came across my GCSE Coursework website on video games. Naturally I uploaded it for you all to criticise. 
www.nanor.co.uk
www.nanor.co.uk
My GCSE Coursework
- Thread starter Nanor
- Start date
PsiSoldier
Well-Known Member
Indeed?
Wol
In Cryo Sleep
Wols take on web design and development:
1) Frontpage: don't use it. just don't. Notepad(++) is a good way forward. WYSIWYG web dev things wank all over your site and seem to screw stuff up a fair bit.
2) Forms: If you need them just for show as you said, don't use frontpage(again....)'s form creator, as it does cunty things like that form submitter page. You can usually just stick in the elements, and just have the submit button either not do anything, or have its onClick attribute do a simple "window.location('submitted.htm');" kind of thing.
3) Pages can have titles. "New Page 1" is a shit title
4) Don't use frames - more requests to your server, more bandwidth used, slower load time.
5) The layout of the pictures / text alternating sides is nice. Good to have pictures to go along with what you're describing which is less monotonous. Possibly make them a bit smaller, as they do dominate the page a lot.
6) Try and use titles a lot more distinctively. You've got 16pt purple title, in regular text. Try emphasising it a bit more with a colour that stands out from the black and really defines a break between sections in the page.
7) There seems to be a big black chunk on the right hand side wasting the lovely res of my screen. Wol doesn't spend that much on a monitor just for it to be wasted on blackness.
8) The buttons in the nav bar, although looking funky with the different pic when rolled over, can pretty much be implemented in CSS alone ("navitem:hover{ bgcolor:#diffcolor; }"). List items can be used for this. This also reduces the number of requests to your server, as well as bandwidth and load time as before. At least you've got the alt texts on the menu (although not on the other pics on the site...), but for a crappy web browser, it will appreciate having the things as a list item, rather than images!
Bearing in mind this is a fairly critical appraisal, and considering its GCSE level, its a darn sight better than most that I usually see ;-)
and WHY THE FUCK DON'T THEY TEACH CSS AT GCSE. grr.
p.s. don't cite wikipedia as the very first thing you see when you goto the site. heh
1) Frontpage: don't use it. just don't. Notepad(++) is a good way forward. WYSIWYG web dev things wank all over your site and seem to screw stuff up a fair bit.
2) Forms: If you need them just for show as you said, don't use frontpage(again....)'s form creator, as it does cunty things like that form submitter page. You can usually just stick in the elements, and just have the submit button either not do anything, or have its onClick attribute do a simple "window.location('submitted.htm');" kind of thing.
3) Pages can have titles. "New Page 1" is a shit title
4) Don't use frames - more requests to your server, more bandwidth used, slower load time.
5) The layout of the pictures / text alternating sides is nice. Good to have pictures to go along with what you're describing which is less monotonous. Possibly make them a bit smaller, as they do dominate the page a lot.
6) Try and use titles a lot more distinctively. You've got 16pt purple title, in regular text. Try emphasising it a bit more with a colour that stands out from the black and really defines a break between sections in the page.
7) There seems to be a big black chunk on the right hand side wasting the lovely res of my screen. Wol doesn't spend that much on a monitor just for it to be wasted on blackness.
8) The buttons in the nav bar, although looking funky with the different pic when rolled over, can pretty much be implemented in CSS alone ("navitem:hover{ bgcolor:#diffcolor; }"). List items can be used for this. This also reduces the number of requests to your server, as well as bandwidth and load time as before. At least you've got the alt texts on the menu (although not on the other pics on the site...), but for a crappy web browser, it will appreciate having the things as a list item, rather than images!
Bearing in mind this is a fairly critical appraisal, and considering its GCSE level, its a darn sight better than most that I usually see ;-)
and WHY THE FUCK DON'T THEY TEACH CSS AT GCSE. grr.
p.s. don't cite wikipedia as the very first thing you see when you goto the site
. heh
Nanor
Well-Known Member
1) Had no choice.
2) Easier to just throw it in and forget about problems.
3) This wasn't my final piece of coursework. It was a backup. I had titles in the final one.
4) Had to.
5) Yeah, true.
6) Noted.
7) Not true! There's a back to top link. Wasn't optimized for mega monitors.
8) Teaching CSS at GCSE is a recipe for disaster.
Wikipedia is awesome. And also the only site I could get on the school networks vaguely resembling anything to with fact regarding games.
2) Easier to just throw it in and forget about problems.
3) This wasn't my final piece of coursework. It was a backup. I had titles in the final one.
4) Had to.
5) Yeah, true.
6) Noted.
7) Not true! There's a back to top link. Wasn't optimized for mega monitors.
8) Teaching CSS at GCSE is a recipe for disaster.
Wikipedia is awesome. And also the only site I could get on the school networks vaguely resembling anything to with fact regarding games.
Traxata
Junior Administrator
waterproofbob
Junior Administrator
Yeah well I was taught how to make nuclear devices at 5.
I have no basis for comment as I have still avoided ever doing any website design what so ever. But for a first stab it looks pretty good tbh. It could be a whole load worse.
I have no basis for comment as I have still avoided ever doing any website design what so ever. But for a first stab it looks pretty good tbh. It could be a whole load worse.
Wol
In Cryo Sleep
1) Stupid school.
2) Fair enough. Again, i think thats a flaw following on from point 1
3) Ah. gdgd.
4) Stupid schools. Why the fuck aren't they teaching this stuff properly....
7) Okay, whys there a big black gap between the text and the 'back to top' link. Also, I can use the 'page up' button to get back to the top of a page. Out of interest, how many people actually use 'back to top' buttons on sites?
8) I disagree. I feel not teaching them, ends up with sites like myspace..... +o(. I'd love to just do a full W3C validator check on all the pages on myspace.... and see how many errors there are. *Not* teaching the use of CSS means that more time is wasted when you need to do site wide edits for styles. How about this: I don't like the purple headers. Make them bigger and different colour. How many edits, in how many files, and how long, do you need to do/take to make this change. Answer without css: most likely arseloads, and quite a while. With css: Answer. 2 edits, 1 file, aprx.... 15 seconds?
tis a shame that schools really do twat up teaching this stuff.
And valid point about school firewalls there too! Maybe a links page with specific pages on the info about games / consoles could have been good, rather than just the wikipedia home page. I dunno what the home page for wikipedia looks like, and im fairly sure a lot of other people wont either, as noone really goes to it to search!
2) Fair enough. Again, i think thats a flaw following on from point 1
3) Ah. gdgd.
4) Stupid schools. Why the fuck aren't they teaching this stuff properly....
7) Okay, whys there a big black gap between the text and the 'back to top' link. Also, I can use the 'page up' button to get back to the top of a page. Out of interest, how many people actually use 'back to top' buttons on sites?
8) I disagree. I feel not teaching them, ends up with sites like myspace..... +o(. I'd love to just do a full W3C validator check on all the pages on myspace.... and see how many errors there are. *Not* teaching the use of CSS means that more time is wasted when you need to do site wide edits for styles. How about this: I don't like the purple headers. Make them bigger and different colour. How many edits, in how many files, and how long, do you need to do/take to make this change. Answer without css: most likely arseloads, and quite a while. With css: Answer. 2 edits, 1 file, aprx.... 15 seconds?
tis a shame that schools really do twat up teaching this stuff.
And valid point about school firewalls there too! Maybe a links page with specific pages on the info about games / consoles could have been good, rather than just the wikipedia home page. I dunno what the home page for wikipedia looks like, and im fairly sure a lot of other people wont either, as noone really goes to it to search!
Wol
In Cryo Sleep
C is an imperative programming language also....
I've used C / C++ loads of times since I was force fed delphi back at A level, and never used delphi once.... Not sure if its just me, but the majority of languages that people doing a computing A level are going to come across after A level, are going to start with something like C / C++, Java, or C# (correct me if I'm wrong, this is just from what I've seen advertised in jobs, and based on the software company my dad works for).
Never understood why schools choose pascal. Easy to learn??
I've used C / C++ loads of times since I was force fed delphi back at A level, and never used delphi once.... Not sure if its just me, but the majority of languages that people doing a computing A level are going to come across after A level, are going to start with something like C / C++, Java, or C# (correct me if I'm wrong, this is just from what I've seen advertised in jobs, and based on the software company my dad works for).
Never understood why schools choose pascal. Easy to learn??
Nanor
Well-Known Member
Wol
In Cryo Sleep
When we were taught delphi, we just had an online tutorial thing to follow through. Such things as how to manually place items on a form (e.g. going new label. label.left = 123, label.top = 45 - pretty pointless stuff) were taught , along with lots and lots of wanky databases. I managed to get through it pretty fast, but i have been programming for about 10 years prior to A level! Some others still struggled, and this wasnt even with a teacher teaching directly, cos he was having to go around and do one to one with people. Wasn't a particularly large class either. In the end, my coursework was to do a database driven website, rather than a windows app, and used ASP, not delphi, thankfully.
I'd say for doing straight numerical algorithms, c / c++ is a pretty good start. Tis matlabby enough (after sitting today and yesterday porting matlab code to c) for future expansion, and isn't overly bloated.
Hoy,
Apparently, not useful enough... I obviously meant brain.
Also, teaching Delphi isn't all that brilliant, in my mind. Delphi is all about the visual stuff, and is different from VB only inasmuch as it uses Pascal-like syntax, whereas VB uses VB-like syntax, but a visual development tool is not my idea of a good environment to teach structured algorythms in, in my mind...
When I learned Pascal, we used paper and pens.
Cheers,
J.
Apparently, not useful enough... I obviously meant brain.
Also, teaching Delphi isn't all that brilliant, in my mind. Delphi is all about the visual stuff, and is different from VB only inasmuch as it uses Pascal-like syntax, whereas VB uses VB-like syntax, but a visual development tool is not my idea of a good environment to teach structured algorythms in, in my mind...
When I learned Pascal, we used paper and pens.
Cheers,
J.
