I chose to do a “hyertextual biography” on the life of JS Bach; specifically, upon his family and musical career.  I choose JS Bach primarily because I am a fan and I wanted to learn more about him and his music, and secondarily because I wanted to author something short and concise about Bach to introduce to people who are interested in the musical giants of the baroque era.

At first I fleshed out the five main highlights of his life and made these my main page topics.   I then embarked upon making the background template image.  I wanted something that was eye catching and eloquent to catch the reader’s attention thereby preventing them from immediately leaving the site (as is common in modern web browsing).  So, I decided to enlarge a picture of Bach and highlight his eyes.  I then made the un-highlighted region into a silhouette which would flow down the page.  The silhouette was mainly for aesthetic purposes; however, it also made the site complement Bach’s contrapuntal style of music by having multiple visual elements working together in harmony.

Once my template background image was in place, the rest of the site “came together.”  I tried using blue textual navigation links at the bottom but that color failed to impress, so I stuck with orange.  The greatest technical challenge I had was working with templates; specially the footer layer.  I never could get the lower footer layer to move downwards in conjunction with the content layer.   I fixed this by using the professor’s recommendation of placing a table at the bottom of my content layer before making the content layer editable.    I then used a <span> (in conjunction with CSS) to modify the adornments of the footer in lieu of a <layer>.