Looking at how I wanted to design the website in the beginning compared to how it turned out, I believe that the main objective that did not change was that I knew that I wanted to create a website for both a young and an older audience. I decided to focus my attention on making sure that the website could be easily read as well as be aesthetically appealing. The information that I had gathered for each of the states and their regions stayed the same, but the amount of information that I had originally planned out to be added to each webpage had to be shortened due to information overload that was bound to occur. The layout of the website continued to change as the implementation of the information went on, and at the end of the project, I do think that the layout turned out better than originally planned. I think that the main problem that I had encountered during the creation of the website was figuring out the layout and how things would appear on the website. Every so often the information on the website would need to be altered and the CSS on a part of the webpage would stop responding. To fix this issue, I decided to add both internal and external CSS to each of the webpages on the website to help ease the design process and the crashing of the website.
Some problems that I had not anticipated at the beginning that might occur and weren’t solved were that the scroll bar on the right-hand side of the webpages for each of the regions could have been limited to seeing only a few states at a time to help ease how much information users are seeing on the webpage. Because this was not implemented into the website, I think that this could be a problem later when a user tries to match up the left-hand side of the webpage to the right-hand side of the webpage to match up pictures to their respective state.
What I learned from creating this website was how to create a database and have it display on a website, how to add more than a simple sentence or word into a database, how to import/export a database in phpMyAdmin, how to connect a database using PHP, and how to document my progress when creating a website. I think that by learning this information, it can help me with becoming a better web developer and programmer because I will now know that documentation is extremely important where projects are involved. I will also have to remember that there might be other people viewing my work, so the more that I explain what I am doing and explain my reasoning for doing so, the easier it will be to present my work and the easier it will be for someone else to see what I did and how things can be improved.
In the future, I hope to be able to implement some of the design prospects that I had planned to do in the beginning of the website, such as creating quizzes for more user interaction along with being able to provide feedback about what users think should be added to the website, or what should be changed. I think that this would help the users become more involved with the look of the website along with what information they wish to learn more about.