Introduction to Hotglue

Hotglue image taken from the homepage of Hotglue - http://hotglue.me/

What is Hotglue video taken from Hotglue homepage - http://hotglue.me/

Resources

Introduction to HotGlue

We started off by watching this video which explained what HotGlue was and what it did.

We were the given the chance to experiment with Hotglue and see what we could do with it. I created a number of pages which included images and videos and then linked the pages together. Below are some of the designs I originally created.

We were then told that we had to create a portfolio using Hotglue to present all of our assignments for web design studio. I decided to scrap the previous web pages and start again as I felt they were messy and could have been laid out in a much better way.

HotGlue is a tool which is used to create websites quickly. Its methods are easy as you can just drag and drop onto the page and move elements around by dragging them across the page. The basic fundamentals at first seem effective to create something quickly but this then takes away features that could be added if you were coding a page. Below are some images that I have screen shotted showing the development of the website that I've created as well as any resources I've used.

What went well?

I think that the whole drag and drop methods of objects is quite fun and its really simple to make something to display your work. When I created the first pages to display videos and photos I found it ideal for just having somewhere to display it all, I think having the gridlines was extremely useful as I could make elements line up in seconds.

What didn't go so well?

Sometimes I wrote out a long paragraph and left the edit menu to find that it didn't save the work that I did, this happened on 2 or 3 occasions and left me thinking I had done something to go back and check later on and see that it wasn't there, which meant I had to copy and paste the text and place it in a document so I didn't have to rewrite everything again. I also forgot to lock elements sometimes and then clicked and dragged it would be the wrong thing, you can't undo changes so you have to try to reposotion, this was a problem with the titles in the menu bar frequently until I learned to lock them all.

Final thoughts and improvements

As a quick way to display content, I would recommend using HotGlue because you can snap something up within half an hour, but I think I'd rather hard code the website for a portfolio as it would enable me to style elements the way I'd like and I have more control on how everything looks. When it comes to fonts HotGlue has 4 or 5 different fonts to use, if I wanted to use others I'd have to write out the paragraphs in a programme such as photoshop and them save them individually as images and then place them onto the site, this would enable a much larger number of fonts but then if I wanted to edit the text for any reason I'd have to go back to the psd file and then edit the text, save it again and finally reimport it. This could be extremely time consuming. In general I feel HotGlue is good because you can encounter problems when trying to do something and then you have to find away around this, for example using different fonts, it just allows you to be more open minded and figure out other ways of reaching your goals for your portfolio. If HotGlue allowed you to choose a font, font size and colour from a palette or list them it would be easier to keep things the same, clicking and dragging to change these isn't ideal as it just makes it hard to keep it all the consistent.

Review process

Menu bar

At first I created a menu bar which I thought looked good and thought it was easy to navigate through the pages, There were 7 Different pages and I had the title of the page in the centre, and then the others either side of that title, the problem was it wasn't consistent, because if i added the title of the page, i had to move one of the other page links, so for each page the links were in different places. Following a discussion with a colleague about this I've decided to keep all of the navigation bars consistent and add the page title below it, this way it wouldn't confuse the user and it was a lot easier to navigate, below are the images of the first and final navigation bars.

Outcome

From using all of the basic HotGlue tools I created this design, which I think is quite a good way to display workings as you just have to scroll down to see the progression of the pieces of work.