In the first week of learning UI and web page design, the obvious first topics to cover were of course HTML and CSS. While at first they seemed to be pretty straightforward, there is definitely a very layered complexity through out styling and designing web pages. I found much of the difficulty to stem from understanding how dividers and paragraphs might be styled on the screen, or atleast laid out, and implementing certain style and design preferences correctly as I envisioned. Most of the time, there were unexpected margins or paddings applied, along with being unable to ascertain why some of the paragraphs and headers were smashed together. However, many of the elements seemed to be pretty basic to understand, only needing to become slightly more familiar to get a better feel of how to use them more properly.
Immediately after learning about HTML and CSS, we dove straight into using frameworks, in particular, Bootstrap 5. Bootstrap opened the door to being able to complete many more complex tasks in a more comprehensive way. However, with the reduction of complexity on these tasks comes with having to learn how to properly use and understand bootstrap constructs. From my personal experience, the concepts themselves weren’t very inherently complex. However, I was really not used to using frameworks up until this point and unfortunately, mostly on my part, I wasn’t as on top of it when it came to self learning on this topic. I didn’t really fiddle around or bother to read up on how to adequately utilize and understand majority of the basic bootstrap classes, such as different containers and their properties, the row and column div classes, along with the navigation bar specifically. I also failed to really learn how to properly string and combine all of these elements, and my lack of fluidity in this showed sorely on the WOD today. Regardless, I still have time to look over and become somewhat competent in Bootstrap, however I sort of wish I had taken the time sooner to better grasp how to use it.
I had a pretty rough time overall with these related topics and lessons, as I think it was a mixture of me both losing a little bit of motivation and not showing as much interest. While I do admit many of the aspects of web development and design are intriguing to me, I think I also happened to be quite a bit more busy around this time, further leading to my disconnect and refusal to expand further upon my knowledge for these lessons. I recognize the importance, however, of understanding how these front end development structures and processes work and how they function, and I really have a newfound respect for people that deal with this and so much more. Regardless, I think I still have some work set out for me, both with catching up on this and also preparing for next weeks dive into learning how to use React.