Samir's Portfolio

Tag: Web design

Personal Journey Reflection of a Web Design & Development – Freshman Year

In this blog post, I’m gonna be reflecting over my journey in web design & development throughout my freshman year. I’ll be sharing the insights, & growths that I experienced from this growing year of my education. Additionally, I’m gonna be addressing some key concepts, projects, or techniques that significantly affected my learning journey. In this post, I aim to give my personal perspective on my early beginnings of web development & designing education.

Some foundational concepts I learned this year are HTML and CSS. These were heavily taught throughout the year and were constantly honed to be better as the year went on. HTML and CSS were the main concepts to be learned of the year. They contributed to my growth because they showed me a glimpse of how code behaved & how it can be manipulated. It also contributed to my growth because they are how websites are made, and so learning them would help me in my web development journey.

Some projects that stood out to me are the animal project and the country website. These stood out to me because they were reliant on what I could do, and I didn’t have a foundation of how to make the website or what to make it look like. It was all up to my own creativity and imagination to create the website. Additionally, because I was forced to use my own creativity & resources, it forced me to grow. It forced my skills to improve because I had to improvise & figure out ways to do things myself.

I’ve made a lot of progress throughout this year and have a lot of goals for the upcoming years in web development. I plan to learn Javascript & learn how to create more responsive websites.

Overall, this year has shown me a lot in web development & design. I think I learned a lot for a first year, & I hope to learn more in the coming years of my education. I learned many fundamental concepts that built a base for me to build upon with the coming years. Additionally, projects honed & strengthened my web development skills throughout the year. I think this year was very satisfactory for learning web development.

June 3, 2024
How to Talk to a Web Developer

Collaboration is really important when you’re a web developer. When you’re working on a group project, it’s real important that you make sure to talk to your group mates and share your ideas. Good communication is what makes the web development easier for the entire group. In web development, everybody is going to be working on their own share of the project, and each share is most likely different from another. If nobody’s sharing progress, we have no way to tell where everybody else is at. However, if we communicate better, we can make sure that everybody is on the same page & fix errors and just overall make the entire process a lot smoother.

Understanding basic Web Development concepts is important because it helps you have more smooth conversations with people when you’re discussing about it. When people talk about web design, people can throw in words like: HTML, JAVASCRIPT, PHP, etc.. It’s important that you already know the concept and meaning of those words before hand so you know what the person is talking about. Additionally, when we understand basic concepts, it can also helps in the creation of websites, because you will know the terms for some things you see as you develop.

Asking questions and for clarifications is a good habit to make when you’re puzzled over something in a group work. You should always be respectful when you’re asking the question/asking for clarification. Things like ‘excuse me’ or ‘can you please elaborate’ are things you can say. You should also be more specific with your question. For example, instead of saying something like ‘I don’t know how to do this’, say ‘how do you center a div'(if that’s what you’re trying to do). Additionally, you should always be paying attention and focused so that you do not have to be asking any questions or for any clarifications, but make sure to follow these basic rules if you ever do have the need to do so.

Collaboration is key web development. When you’re working in a group coordinated work, it’s important that you’re talking with your group mates to keep in touch on the group progress. Additionally, it’s important to understand basic web development concepts because it can help make conversations with other developers smoother when you have a basic understanding of different concepts. When you’re in doubts or confused about something, you should always try to ask or clarify about it to your group mates, but do try to pay attention in the first place. Being attentive in the end will usually not require any clarification. By going by these principles, we can make collaboration in Web development more efficient.

May 6, 2024
Brown in Website Design
Color plays a heavy role in influencing people psychologically. Different colors can make us feel different things. For example, colors like black and purple may evoke ominous or mysterious feelings. Similarly, colors like yellow and orange may strike more jolly or bright feelings. When we scheme out colors in our web design, we can sway users feelings and emotions to influence them to do something.

Brown is a unique color when it comes to emotional influence. People usually associate it with warmth, stability, & reliability. Some examples of businesses or companies that use it are
- YMC
- Maggie Rose
- UPS
These big names utilize brown in their web design so as to sway peoples opinion towards their brand.

In conclusion, colors can play a big role in influencing peoples emotions. We can take advantage of this in web designing to sway people towards our brand. The color brown in particular can evoke feelings of reliability, warmth, & stability.
April 29, 2024
3 Reasons to be Excited About Web Development & Design

Have you ever scrolled through a really badly made website and thought, “Wow, this site sucks….”? And then you scroll through an actually well made one like Apple.com and notice the big difference. The makers behind all of that are actually web developers & designers. There’s a lot of reasons to be excited about web development & design. The 3 things on what I believe is to be most excited about web development & design is the creativity aspect, the problem solving aspect, & that your work is constantly changing with trends & design styles. All of these sound very vague as of right now, but allow me to explain.

The first reason I mentioned to be most excited about web development & design is the open creativity it requires. Assuming you’ve already read about every other students portfolio, I’m assuming you’ve already heard this reason for the 50th time—because I can tell it sounds like a very common reason to choose. But it’s true though. Even in both the design or development aspect you can still be creative. For design, this is self-explanatory. Everything you design is what you express. It’s what you think fits what you’re looking for. It’s like a mental playground because you can play around to see what works as a design & what doesn’t. For development, creativity can be a lot of things, but I’ll go with the way you can come up with a solution. When trying to come up with a piece of ‘show’ on a website, (in most cases) there will be no definite piece of code that makes it happen. This means one person could have a completely different approach to writing the ‘same’ type of code than another. It really demonstrates the creativity of people

The second reason I want to talk about to be most excited about web development & design is the problem solving of it. As a web developer, you will constantly face problems in your code. If you did something wrong in your code, it’s up to you to find out what you did wrong and how you can improve it. Sometimes you’ll be sitting a chair for 4 minutes not knowing why your code isn’t working. That’s alright, you can look up to help you around so you actually know what to do the next time you come across the same problem. If you get better & faster at smaller problems, solving bigger problems can also come easier to you. It’s a very brain engaging process and I would deem it enjoyable. I can only assume others would too.

The last reason I want to talk about to be the most excited about web development & design is that your work will constantly be changing with time. The world is constantly changing, and with a changing world comes changing trends. As a web developer AND designer, you will be constantly producing new types of work over years and won’t be dealing with the same things every single year. I think it’s probably the most ‘fun’ thing about my reasons, because it’s one of the most impacting. This will constantly test your creativity and you will face new problems along the way with the newer trends coming in, which is why I put it last.

Really, there is so much things that’s to be excited about web. It can bring out your creativity & problem solving skills and constantly bring new ideas to you and other web designers & developers. I can’t even finish the list to describe all the possibilities to be excited about web. Honestly though, it’s all up to the person. All of these reasons were come up by me & why I think you should be excited for web. It’s all preference on the person really. Just try for yourself & see what excitement it has to offer you.

Source for paragraph 4

November 14, 2023