Week One - Chapters 1-3

As I went through the first chapter I was surprised to see how many changes and additions have been made since the last time I did any website development. I never designed websites professionally but I had a fan site for a favorite TV show of mine that I learned how to create all by myself. This was in 1996 when websites were still pretty basic. I learned HTML all by myself and at some point stopped practicing with it. Now with things like Weebly and Yola, beautiful website creators, I never really felt like going back to learn of all the changes. I had never heard of CSS, XML, PHP, FLASH and the like and am excited to learn about them. Despite having a fairly cool Weebly website for my class, I would still like to have the freedom to develop a website exactly the way I want it with no limitations. So I am excited to start looking at the website development portion of this class. 

Something else that really caught my eye was how many “things” now have access to the web. I started with a computer and now I have so many web connected devices I don’t think I could count them.  Recently I bought a new car that has access to the web for MOG. The picture of the refrigerator with web access seems funny but I bet something like that is already in production. It would actually be kind of cool if it could access the web for recipes and the like. I also have TV’s that can now receive signals from the web directly allowing me to ditch the ROKU box. Truly, access to the web is expanding so much and it seems so normal now, but in 1996 it probably would have sounded like science fiction to me. I have actually become really interested in getting started with website production now and hope I could actually create my own site for both web browsers on desktop computers and maybe even a mobile version (most of my students connect this way)

I found the reduced search time data interesting as well. It is something I would never think about to be honest. Amazon increased their overall sales by simply reducing the amount of load time for their searches. It makes sense because I know I get really pushy when websites don’t load fast enough. I was also surprised to see that web access on mobile devices is looking to become the primary way users connect. I have only built simple websites where optimization wasn’t really an issue, but I can see how it could quickly become an issue for some users with slow internet connections.