I’ve accomplished 3 minor victories, and now, the weekend is over, which means my ever-growing project to-do list is going to have to wait until Wednesday. Still, I am very pleased with myself. Not everything is how I’d like it and I can’t for the life of me figure out pop-up positioning, but I’ll get to that in due time. (If any of you have figured out how to position a popup over a specific point, let me know. Laura, I think you were wrestling with popup footnotes, yes?)
Anyway, here are my victories, minor though they may seem:
- Blood Spatter: Lest you think you cannot download special Photoshop brushes specifically to create blood spatter prints, I assure you, you can. You can, and I did. I tried every combination and shade of red that I could think of, but I finally have some blood spatter that is enough to hint at crime and yet not so much that you worry you’ve made your way to a horror site (at least that is my hope.)
- Dissolving Header Into Background: I tried to make my header fade into the background. And I tried. And I tried. I learned 10 interesting and new effects, like making ragged edges using a layer mask, and eating away at the image so that it looks like critters chewed on it. No, really. But alas, none were really the effect I was looking for. Finally, I figured out how to fade an image into a transparent background and my header now does this.
- Image Maps/Popup Image Details: And last, but certainly not least, I turned a wide shot of a Nutshell into an image map and created 5 hotspots that pop a detail image and some text. It’s very much work in progress as there are no indicator points to tell the user where to hover to see the detail; the hotspot is pretty far away from where I actually want it; and there’s no explanatory text anywhere, but it works.
All of the above can be seen here. Please remember, this is my sandbox. I’m not quite done building out my castle.
I feel like I just climbed Everest.
Here is my challenge and if anyone has ideas on a solution, your next latte is on me. I placed my image, carefully measured out where the hotspots should be and coded them accordingly in my CSS (with coordinates on the x-y- axes). Furthermore, I used Dreamweaver’s handy little drag and drop placing function and put them Exactly. Where. I. Want. Them. And yet when I upload, they are still out of place. I have a feeling that I need to reset something to zero so that the browser doesn’t override my settings, but I can’t figure it out. Any help you might have would be greatly appreciated.
Additionally, I’d like to use bigger images, but then I run the risk of expanding my site beyond the 14-16-words-per-line sweet spot to which we must all strive. What do you think? Should I go bigger and run the risk of having longer sentences?
