Back to the Front End

Today’s work has been almost entirely cosmetic, and it’s starting to drive me up the wall. I’ll be the first to admit that design has never been one of my strong suits, and creating an aesthetically pleasing front end of my website has continued to be one of my greatest points of frustration. Today, I began work on the revamped version of my homepage. As mentioned previously, I want my home page to be a bit more informative and better communicate the purpose of my site. While I have my new welcome message down, I’m struggling to implement the other visual features that I’d like to include. Essentially, I’d like to have my welcome message alongside a nice picture of myself on a dark background. I’d also like to have a button on the bottom right hand of the page that will allow the user to slide this container on and off the screen if they want a better look at my website’s background image. ![Screenshot of homepage in progress][1] So far, I’ve been able to implement the message, my profile picture, and the basic structure that I’d like my homepage to have. The sticking points, however, have been the sizing of the message box and the show/hide transition button. The message box appears to be wildly different sizes on different monitors even though I’ve been using fluid containers to hold the contents of the message itself. Additionally, my show/hide button hasn’t been functioning at all and I haven’t been able to discover why. A helpful response to a similar question on Stack Exchange led me to the relatively simple jQuery function shown below: ![Screenshot of transition jQuery function][2] But at the moment, it isn’t producing the desired effect. I wonder if the structure of this function was written for a previous version of the language. If so, I’ll have to break into it myself to see what I can do. I was going to mention a few more improvements that I had made yesterday, but today’s work turned out to be more consuming than I thought. I think I’ll have to save them for a later time. For now, I’m going to step away from the website for the rest of the day so that I can come back to it with a fresh brain tomorrow. -Joe [1]: https://pickert-website-static.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/blog/11-7-19/Screen+Shot+2019-07-11+at+3.04.18+PM.png [2]: https://pickert-website-static.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/blog/11-7-19/Screen+Shot+2019-07-11+at+3.07.55+PM.png