Before beginning this project, I had little to no knowledge on HTML and CSS so when reading through the brief for this project I was a little shocked and nervous about how I was going to create an actual website, all in four weeks. But I’m very happy to say that I have surprised myself and I have created a website that I am proud of and that meets the learning objectives that were set. And on top of this, I have discovered a new interest for coding.

I knew that the coding aspect of this project was going to be a bit of a challenge at first, so I decided straight away that I was going to get out of my comfort zone and put a lot of effort into learning HTML and CSS to make it a little easier for myself. I read up on a variety of websites and I undertook the ‘Free Code Camp’ tasks, which helped me to learn the very basics of writing code. I also attended all of Mark’s coding workshops which I found were very beneficial for building a website and they taught me a fair bit about CSS grid.

I think I planned out my website very successfully before I started building it, from the crazy number of sketches I did to my initial layout designs on Adobe XD. I found this really helped me when putting the whole thing together, so I didn’t forget to include anything important.

One of my strengths for this project was my ability to overcome the moments when I couldn’t get certain parts of the code to work as I never gave up trying; I think my perseverance really got me through this project. At times, I found it really difficult and I would get frustrated when things didn’t work how I wanted them to. But I used my own initiative to fix my problems, I was able to find out most of the answers to my questions online on useful websites like ‘W3 Schools’ and ‘CSS Tricks’ and I often found that it was only minor mistakes that I had to fix.

I enjoyed playing around with different navigation elements, figuring out ways to make the website interactive for the user, so there is always something to keep them engaged. For example, I found it fun incorporating image carousels and having links off to different pages with more stuff to see. Another thing that I made sure to do when building my website was to include ‘alt’ tags for every image, to ensure that my website was ethically designed. This is important to improve the accessibility of the website by describing what an image is showing to visitors who do not have the ability to see them. It also allows search engines to better crawl and rank my website.

From a design perspective, I am really happy with how my website is designed and laid out. I particularly enjoyed this aspect to the project. I tasked myself to create my own logo and personal branding for the website which I found really fun to do. I think the design really represents me and my personality as well as my design style, yet it still looks clean and professional. I am proud of how it showcases my four projects with the colours of each one complimenting each other really well.

Overall, I really enjoyed this project and I have learnt so much in such a short amount of time. I have created a website that I am really happy with. My experience with coding won’t be stopping here; seeing as I have developed a new interest for this side of design, I aim to further extend and keep improving my website, adding more projects in the future. But for now, I am proud of what I have managed to achieve in this project.