Setting up Ruby on Rails

I wanted to develop the website on my own personal Apple mac. This meant I needed to setup Ruby on Rails on this device for the first time, this is something that would see me running complicated commands in Terminal.

These are the commands used to setup a Ruby website.

$ – Simply a note to remind myself to run this as a command

cd – change directory (move to a specific folder to work on)
To start a new website, the following commands are required.

1 $ cd ~/Documents/Projects/
2 $ rails new portfolio -d mysql
3 $ cd ~/Documents/Projects/portfolio

1 – This command selects the location of the new site

2 – This command sets up the Rails file structure in the chosen directory and names it ‘portfolio’.

3 – This command sets Terminals within the portfolio page.

 

Next is the sercurity of the server, open the file (config/database.yml) and change the password.

4 $ mysql.server start
5 $ rails db:create

4 – This command starts a server on the macintosh and allows for live editing.

5 – This command will run the database

 

//Start building the website

1. – This section explains which ppage is the page that should load as the root file. Usually just the index page;
   Config/routes.rb
   Add this code on line 2;
   root to: ‘application#index’

2. – This is also required for the same reason as part 1;
app/controllers/application_controller.rb
Add this code before the end:
def index
end

3. – This actually creates the index file that is being loaded up;
Create the file index.html.erb
In directory app/views/application/index.html.erb

4. – Add other scss files in stylesheets folder, create the header & content sass files;

– application.scss;

@import
‘header’,
‘content’;

5. Add variables file, which allows for fonts and colours to be stored as variables, making styling the site much easier.

Once the site files were ready it meant I could immediately start working on them. The following code is what I would use on a daily basis while working on the project. They change the directory (files) that i’m working on, run the server and counteract a common mySQL error.

$ cd Documents/Projects/Optimadmin
$ cd Documents/Projects/osl_2017

Run the server:
$ rails s

If you get a mySQL error:
1. ctrl + c to quit server
2. $ mysql.server start

Advertisement

FOURTH POLYMER PROJECT TEST

This test was a really important stage because it stopped me from doing what I planned to do. I wanted to use the grid system for the homepage which looked really nice and had fluid animations between the different screens. You can see a working model of the example I was working on here.

It looked really good, inital testing showed that should be a reasonably simple example to work with. The only issue I had encountered so far was the mobile version would need to be completely different as it looks so compacted when in the mobile version as can be seen here;

Then I tried to work with the code itself. While I had read an entire book ( JAVASCRIPT & JQUERY written by Jon Duckett) on reading and writing javascript code, it still managed to beat me. I believe that though using online forums etc to double check my code it was in fact correct but unfortunately the javascript I wanted to use clashed with the Polymer project and returned the user a blank screen.

I tried to create a div with a set id of #test2, then I created a string connected to the div using ;

 document.getElementById("test2");

This would pull the information from the div through the javascript. Therefore, it appears  through trail and error and online feedback that this just wouldnt work in this scenario.

References;

https://elements.polymer-project.org/elements/neon-animation?active=neon-animated-pages&view=demo:demo/index.html

Moving the head

Google rates websites on their length, meaning web developers now have to push to reduce the amount of code on their websites. Something that has proven worthwhile after research is to move all of the head information to a seperate file, this achieves two things. Firstly the site has a much smaller amount of code on it, which means its going to rank higher for seo and secondly, it is worthwhile because the time saved making the entire site adds up when you consider you only have to edit the head once to effect every page.

This is something I wanted to practise before creating my next project, so below is an example of this completed.

First the index.html file where the head holds the php include;

Secondly the head.php file which has all of the head data for the site;

Finally the stylesheet.css is connected through the head file;

This makes the website appear as normal, but the previously mentioned benifits.

ACORN ROOFING – Final Evaluation

When starting this project I thought it was crucial to avoid diving in with designs and code so I did some research into the users of the site, and with a focus group of the competitors website I found an interesting correlation. The more the company was worth the better their website was, this could mean two things, a good website can give the  indication of a company being bigger and better than it is, or it could simply mean that the bigger the company the more money they have to spend on their website. Regardless it was an interesting correlation that proved a good website can go a long way. Next I brainstormed my ideas on paper which allowed me to start selecting important ideas for design, this included deciding the content of the pages and how they were going to be designed. I thought due to time constraints and knowledge that it would be a too bigger task to try and make the site responsive or adaptive so I simply focused on make the site accessible by every browser, this meant I created a website that was 960 pixels wide to fit on the standard monitor and tablets. I then created three wireframes which focused on the placement of the content to allow me to visualise the site. Next was to turn these wireframes into physical designs, and once that was done I was able to choose one and start building it. I realised (when I had almost completed building the site) that the pageless design was flawed and was bad for search engine optimisation. I started researching the flaws of SEO and realised that this design was going to fail in the seo area so I decided to restart from the wire frame stage. I took the best of all my wireframes and built them into one overall design, next I created the final design and built this from the ground up. The final stage I took was to test the site on all browser and devices to make sure it worked and luckily everything worked as I wanted. The only issue being is that on mobile the text and buttons were quite small but this was expected as I hadn’t planned to make a mobile version of the site.

Something I learnt was how to use file transfer protocol (FTP) to make sure I was editing my site live on the server rather than locally, as I am aware it is important to do so because it means that should any problems arise I can fix them right then rather than waiting until I FTP my finished site only to realise it has issues once it is on the internet. I was also aware of the fact that I should you the put and get tool on the local & server sites area of Adobe dreamweaver, this is important as if you drag and drop you can corrupt the files beyond repair meaning the site doesn’t work at all.

I learnt that hierarchy within the file structure of the site is extremely important because it means that should another developer need to work on your site, it easily understandable what and where everything is. I learnt it was important to separate images which were an integral part of the design, and the the pictures which featured on the site. I also understand that because images take a lot of bandwidth to load on a site, I found it was crucial to make sure the image was the smallest possible file size it could be. I did this by making sure that every image featured on the site was set to the exact size the actual image was.

One issue I have discovered with my website is when you hover over images within the site, I have created divs that use css to implement the background, the reason for this is to allow the text to be easier manipulated on top. I have used the :hover element in css to select a slightly darker version of the image when you hover, the problem with this however is that when you initially rollover the image, the area turns to white for about a second then shows the darker image. with a bit of research I believe it is because there in no code specify what the onMouseover image is, but there is no way of doing this within the css. I would simply have to code the images through html and use  onMouseOver and onMouseOut, this would me to get the desired effect without the white spaces, although this would mean I would have to create a z-index for all of the content within the div.

Another issue I was unable to resolve was that of the underline to the bottom left of the twitter logo in the footer. I removed both Twitter and Facebook logo html and both time the underline disappeared, this is confusing because you can select it on the page as if it was physical content but there is no sign of it within the code, after researching it and trying to understand what the issue is I am still unsure and this is something I will continue to try and figure out.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

Understanding how meta data was something I made an effort to learn, since I had changed my design based upon the fact it is not SEO appropriate. I found that meta data is the content that is not visible by the browser but only search engines only. I needed to apply the basic searching techniques from Google into my design.

Search engines like google use “crawlers”, a web bot that follow links on the internet for the specific aim of creating an index of all the sites on the web worldwide.

I learnt that having multiple internal and external links to the site helps the website get a higher ranking, but this is along with the other parts of the how the search engine makes sure your page is most relevant to what the user is looking for.

Making sure that the hierarchy of content is obvious to search engines is essential as it means you get the relevant pages listed, you can do this by creating a sitemap. A sitemap lists all the pages connected to a webpage so that the crawler can easily list them. You also need to have a robots.txt, to make sure that the crawler knows it has access to the page and is meant to list this page.

Lessons Learnt

Coming onto the course with a little bit of prior knowledge I found it relatively easy to code the website. While I found it somewhat easy, that does not mean it didn’t come without challenges and I learnt quite a few valuable lessons whilst coding the site. I knew already that html was the base of the website which contained the content while the css was simply the styling of the site. I was aware that everything was put into containers called divs, these could be linked with css file to give each container its own style, it is through these basic principles that a website is created. Animation and transitions are not required for this module I thought it would be best to simply refine my current skills to iron out any flaws and complete a website the best of my ability. One of the biggest lessons Learn’t from this experience was the difference between padding and margin elements within a css file. I was using them as if they were the same type of thing, and then realising there were issues on the page where there would be areas of white space that I didn’t understand. This is something I researched and then began to understand that the padding was space within the div around the elements, whereas the margin in the space outside of the div. Another lesson I learnt during this project is that you can actually create layers within the page, and while I still haven’t mastered this yet I know understand that when there is a z-index present in the css file, then it means that something is layered on the webpage.

Adaptive, Fluid, Responsive or Static?

Responsive or Adaptive?

Responsive web design allows you to create a website that will adjust itself to fit the size of the browser regardless of the size of the screen. It means you code it once and it will flow more like a grid with images that will rescale themselves to fit the screen.

Adaptive web design is where you make lots of different versions of the same website so that it fits the different screen resolutions perfectly, while effectively gaining more control of the specific user experiences, it is time consuming. Adaptive design uses breakpoints that mean once you reach a predefined point, the layout will change to fit the screen again.

Something to take note of when making adaptive or responsive sites, is that they all use the same information but use styling to change the information. For example, an image is required at a large size, then the browser will resize it depending on the screen size. Therefore, when possible, it is important to use vectors. It is equally important to remember that you should always design for the desktop and then work smaller down to mobile rather than starting at mobile size.

So overall, fixed websites, the ones I am currently learning how to build have set widths and no media queries (allows the size to understand the size of the device it’s being used on). Fluid websites are a little different, they rely on percentages for relative widths to the browser itself, therefore they don’t need to you use media queries either. Adaptive are built to certain resolutions, then require media queries to determine the device or resolution, these usually rely on set or relative widths. Responsive seems to be a lot more focused on the actual resizing of the display as it is actually designed at multiple levels using again media queries and relative widths.

I found the utility http://www.liquidapsive.com/ which has the same design but allows you to change the way it is coded so you can see for yourself fluid, static, adaptive etc. This allowed me to find the negatives of using every type design. My first finding, one that I was already experiencing when designing my site was when you try to reduce the size of a static site;

Adaptive is time consuming and works well for smaller devices but as you can see there are white borders on each side of the design once you reach a certain size.

Liquid, because it uses percentages of the width works really well at larger sizes but starts to become illegible when you start to minimise it to a smaller level;

Finally, responsive seems to be the go to style as it works when the browser is both really large and really small.

Having understood the different types I thought it would be important to have a look at current responsive sites, as it was the best option from the four above.

Meti Design is a really nice responsive site complete with animation, smooth transitions and a nice 3D animation using frame loads like I noted previously in Sony’s Be Moved Campaign (https://akbrodie.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/website-analysis-4-dangersoffracking-com/). This makes the website look very professional and I found myself wanting one of the products they produce, whether that’s because of the website or not, I am unsure.Below you can see the different screen sizes effecting the page, and how similar the experience looks.

Skinny ties also have created very good responsive site that promotes the ties they sell. It works just like a responsive site should but has thew addition of a feature that I haven’t seen anywhere else. This feature being the fact that the rollover still works regardless of the screen size, I am unsure if this is pointless or not as when the screen sizes are smaller they generally are touch screen but it turns out that when used on a mobile, the rollover menus come up when the menu items are clicked on. Below you can see the images of the screen sizes and then the different sizes with the rollover menus.

 

Mry is probably my favourite out of the lot though, doing what my research said about starting with desktop and working your way down removing parts bit by bit. The desktop version is complete with zooming circles with flat colours and images in the background while the mobile version has none of this and turns into a box style, therefore creating to completely different experiences for the user depending on how they view the site. You can see this here;

 

References;

http://mry.com/

http://skinnyties.com/
http://www.metidesign.com/#

The End/A New Beginning – Pageless Design

The final stage of building the site was to open Dreamweaver and actually create the site.  as you can see below, I reached an almost complete site with a html file linked with a css file. As I was working and writing up the alt tags and the meta data I realized that it was limited for the search engines to find my site and that my listing would be compromised due to the lack of these. I thought before I continued, I would research the downsides of pageless design and then decide whether to continue with this design, below is the progress I have made so far.

Understanding the importance of file hierarchy took an important role of setting up the site, I knew that should anyone else need to come and work on this site, they would need to understand what all the files were. Therefore I made sure my files were labelled correctly and tidily. You can see the structure below;

The site is constructed correctly so that the layout is fully in order, I used Lorem Ipsum as filler text to begin with as that is a fine detail that can be changed in a later stage. The images in portfolio section of the page have a rollover feature so that you can see what the property looked like before the work was done. This was done using a <table> element to allow the images to be laid out correctly on multiple screen sizes. I set up code to allow the user to press the “Contact Us” button on their phone and would automatically start calling from their phone. These were both two things I do think work really well, so these will definitely be staying in the design.

There are two faults I have made so far though, In the .textbox div that overlaps the people on the roof, I have made the mistake of using attributes (position:relative and top:-250px;) This is a specific fault as you shouldn’t use these as it will mean the following content will not follow it’s normal flow, therefore, I must research an alternative method. The same can be said for .textbox2 but this one hasn’t been adjusted to the full extent to be over the top of the image.

This means I need to research an alternative method, which doesn’t break rules of html and css code, my research indicates that an z-index attribute would create a layer over the top of the other sections of the page, this is exactly what I need so I will be researching Z-Index.

This is evidence of the website I created;

DESIGN

HTML

CSS

Back to Code

As our first task we were told to recreate this site (http://dynamic.artdesignhull.ac.uk/shared/framework-03/home-page.php)

With a few visual aspects that were due to my photoshopping skills on the buttons and the actual images i chose to include, there are very few differences between the two sites as you can see, they are almost the same.

Original;

My Version;

I understand a few things are very important when designing websites. Firstly, keeping your code tidy so you can hand off the work, I believe I have done that with both my HTML;

and my CSS;

Secondly a keeping your hierarchy of files tidy and in order, I believe I have also done that;

Featured Image: http://cdn.wonderfulengineering.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/code-wallpaper-2.jpg