The past two weeks have been overwhelmingly busy and productive. The first week (known at my college as “Gap Week”) was a week off from classes where I spent a good deal of my time watching HTML and CSS tutorials on YouTube while also taking the occasional casual bike ride to clear my head. My progress in web development is something to be proud of. I am starting to feel like I have an actual control over the layout of a web page instead of relying heavily on a template and simply replacing text strings and image directories. This report marks a major step in my web development process. I have been working nearly all week on perfecting my “Home” page on robhossboss.com and just moments before starting this blog post I discovered that mere HTML and CSS are not enough to achieve my dream for the page. I have found the need for JavaScript.

The home page of robhossboss.com is not that complicated. It’s just a background of my face, a gif image of my mock signature, a button that says “About Me” and links to my bio page, and a footer containing all my social media links. While getting this page to look great on the desktop was a snap, making it look even halfway decent on mobile was a huge issue for me. Even though I am using Bootstrap whose motto is “Mobile first!” something about this page just breaks every common web design rule when viewed on a mobile display. I’ve tried everything short of attempting to re-code the entire HTML as well as CSS dependencies from scratch instead of modifying a page from Bootstraps “Clean Blog” template available online (which I may very well do once I feel a bit more comfortable with CSS).

I’m in the works of scheduling a photo shoot with my college’s multimedia department after seeing an email stating that the department is open all summer for the express purpose of taking free professional shots of students and faculty for use in publications and websites. I have several ideas for integration of high-quality photos of myself in the “About” section of my website. I envision using JavaScript to animate theses images as the user interacts with the site. The next 7 weeks of my summer will be nearly out of the question for any real changes to the site as I will be preoccupied with the Entrepreneurship for the Public Good (EPG) program that I am enrolled in. It is my plan to dedicate the remainder of my summer after EPG to mastering CSS and begin learning JavaScript. I will likely pay for a month of Lynda.com’s subscription as I have heard nothing but good reviews of the service and finding a good set of YouTube videos for learning the “nitty-gritty” of web development is becoming difficult. My goal for this summer is to have a respectable online presence both through social media and my very own website that I built and maintain myself.