Slowly, very slowly

You never really understand how amazingly large an entire website is until you try and design it all. Once you have done all your beginning design work and have decided what you actually want to say, you would think it would be smooth sailing. WRONG. Writing a website is hard work. You are basically designing you site twice, once is photoshop, and once in html/css. The photoshop version is so you can see exactly what you are going to write into the code. This process took me several weeks. Next you have to basically translate that work from a nice visual image into a dynamic working website. That is where I am now. I have nice images, but no website...

Here are a two of my final photoshop creations.

This page is all about cyclocross. It I win in coding the main four photos will have a rollover effect that will allow the viewer to point at a picture and see it in full color and then move their mouse away and see the picture in the colorized version.

This page is comparing an average cyclist to a racer. I drew both illustrations in illustrator and then imported them with their text. The finished web version should look exactly like this with a working scroll option.

Progress...

It has been a crazy few weeks. I have been working on learning new software and creating new designs that will function on the web. Here is some of my progress.

Here is the very beginning. This is where I decided what I would need, where I would put it and how you would navigate through the website. Confusing though it may be, this holds all my beginning information.

Attempt number one. This is one of my first sketches for a main content page. The idea was to put a picture of the different types of ground relative to each type of racing. Then I would use one main picture to describe the feel and look of that race.

This was another first idea. This one combines several pictures and just a color for the background without the texture idea. I also brought in some wheel and crank illustration/pictures to give the top and interesting look.

These two pictures are mockups of what a real page might look like. Most of my class like the bottom one better. However several thought that the textures around the frames in the first felt more dirty like the sport.