MYP Personal Project Process Journal: August 2013

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Very excitiing news!

I spent some time earlier today on the following course:
http://www.ed2go.com/online-courses/css-and-xhtml-introduction?tab=detail
And I've made my first HTML script and learned the basic elements in HTML.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><body>
<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>
</body></html>

Its the most basic script and all it does is make the page say "My First Heading/My First paragraph" but its progress!

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Tutorials I've found

With the help of my friends on Reddit and other forums I have decided to use WordPress for sure (not in blog form, but hosted on a website my dad will help me set up). I've also found tons of tutorials to help me learn how to build the website itself:

http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Lessons
http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/wordpress/
http://php.net/manual/en/tutorial.php
http://www.ed2go.com/online-courses/css-and-xhtml-introduction?tab=detail

Friday, August 23, 2013

Update 8/23/13

8/23/13 I've begun my research for my project and posted topics on the forums listed below
reddit.com/r/wordpress
reddit.com/r/programming
http://forums.devshed.com/
http://www.webdeveloper.com/

After consulting with my dad I have decided that the best course of action for making my website will be using WordPress and elements of HTML
in order to install an appropriate theme. Using the help from the websites above I plan on first experimenting with the stuff I learn and then using it on my website.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Making a website for my mom

As soon as summer started my mom started nagging me to make a website that would showcase her eBay store which sold exotic items (like belly dance belts) from India. I thought this would be a waste of time until I remembered that I had to start work on my MYP Personal Project this summer. Building this website for my mom would be the perfect SMART goal. Its been two days since then and I have started talking to my mom and trying to visualize what she had in mind. She wants a basic website that would have a nice homepage that attracted customers, had a contact form, along with tabs on the top, along with a couple other things. I was able to streamline these requirements to three basic ones:

Must be aesthetically pleasing
Must be easy to navigate
Must include a contact form

I will measure my success by asking my mom to rate my website on a scale from 1-10. If I get a 7 or above, I will deem the project successful. I will achieve this by taking help from website development experts on the internet and using WordPress (recommended to me by my mom). As my website development skills are virtually non existent I took the liberty of asking WordPress experts on a forum known as Reddit. They recommend learning HTML, CSS and a few basic WordPress classes. They say this will take roughly 1 month and shouldn't be very difficult making this project realistic within the time-frame.