Kevin+Van+-+HTML+and+CSS+HW

Kevin Van HTML and CSS Homework Submission.

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In my opinion, the original CMNS webpage is generally well designed. The elements of the page are visibly separated and the structure is organized. The design is very linear and I feel that the visual aspects are appropriate for an academic website. There were only a few issues that I came across. Firstly, the inclusion of the date in the upper right corner of the header is not very useful because the text does not contrast with the background. Users would have a hard time reading this text and background combination. The navigation tab doesn’t strike me as very different from the page. I believe that the navigation tab should be made clearly separate as its function is very important. The search bar at the top right corner also strikes me as merely “put aside.” The availability of the search functionality should be made more apparent to the user. The hot topics column has alternating row colors. However, the alternating colors are extremely subtle and therefore almost pointless. Lastly, the most unimportant issues were the archive links. I thought that their font-weight was a little inadequate.

To address these issues I only needed to make a few changes. First, I made the text for the date bold and white to increase the contrast and visibility. To make the navigation tab feel more separated I changed the colors of all the links. I also made them bold to make them look more important. In addition I made the links background change color on hover to give the user instant visual feedback. To make the search bar more apparent I just centered it by using an absolute positioning via the style sheet. I then changed the alternating row colors of the hot topics so that the rows were more contrasted from one another. I changed the background colors of the links here as well to give the user instant feedback. Finally, I addressed the font-weight issue of archive links by changing them to bold on hover.