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Saturday, 06 December 2008 |
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Well I guess its time I write another blog. It's been awhile since last time.
Work is going really well. It's pretty fun and exciting and I really like what I'm doing. I've worked on several large projects. Basically I have two main job functions right now. I help maintain current websites that Interworks built, make updates and changes to the content, and secondly I do what’s called "building out.” Making a website is basically a three step process. The first step is the design step. Pretty self-explanatory...our designer, Matt, gets information from the client about what they are thinking their site should look like. This includes color schemes, content positioning, website features. With all of those things in mind he creates a layout in Photoshop. After the design is finished it is sent to the client for review. If approved it goes on to what’s called "cut-up."
Cut-up is where somebody takes the design, which at this point is basically an image, and cuts it up into different images and small elements. For example a websites logo would be an image and the background would be an image. Basically anything that is graphical in nature is separated into its own image (aka: cut-up). Cut-up also involves coding. There are a least two elements to a web page, the html file and the css file. The html file is code which breaks everything down and puts the content on the page. The css tells all the content how it should look and where it should be displayed at. So part of the "cut-up" mans job is to put all the images and content into the html and css files and make sure it displays how the design looks. Most people would say this is the hardest part. One of the biggest challenges with cut-up is getting the website to look the same in all the browsers, IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari. Each of these browsers have little quarks that make things display differently in each one. Our main cut-up guy is named Sean but I have also started doing some cut-up.
After cut-up has completed it goes to "build." The builder takes the cut-up work and usually refines the code a little more to prepare it to be duplicated for as many times as needed. Making the code easy to update by breaking it up into small chunks that can be inserted in every page or "included" is one main task of the builder. For example if you have a menu or navigation on every page of the site it can be taken out and put into its own file and then "included" into the code for each page. Then if any changes need to be made to the navigation you only have to edit one file versus every single page that contains the code. After everything has been refined the html file is copied for as many pages as are needed and then each of those pages are edited and the corresponding content is placed on them.
After all three steps have been completed it is uploaded to the server and deployed to the World Wide Web.
I'm mainly a build/maintainer but like I said above I'm starting to do some cut-up work as well. I've learned a lot about web development and I'll continue to learn more and more each day, and that is really cool. The people I work with are all really cool and my work environment is really relaxed and easy going which is awesome.
The wedding is getting closer, only 3 more weeks! I'm so ready to be married! I couldn't as more a more beautiful and amazing woman to be my bride (this is where you say "awwwww").
Well thats all for now but please leave me some comments!
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