This is great.  Completely reworks the context of the clips to change the portrayal of George Costanza.

I’m pleased to announce that the site of 2010 Canadian Olympian Georgia Simmerling is now live!  I’ve enjoyed working with Callum Ng of NG Farrell Marketing on this project and hope to continue to work with him in the future.

Her site combines a little bit of funky 80’s design with a clean and simple Web 2.0 feel.  Check it out at http://www.georgiasimmerling.com or http://www.georgiasimmerling.ca

Georgia will be competing in Alpine Skiing in Vancouver and blogging about her experiences.  You can also follow her Twitter at http://twitter.com/gsimmerling.

I love Apple.  I hate Apple.  I feel all sorts of emotions in between.  You see, back in the day, my school had the original iMacs and boy were they pretty up against the plain, old, boring grey box that was the PC.  I wanted to love the shiny new iMacs but I just couldn’t.  The problem was, the original iMacs were slow and worst of all they froze every 15 minutes, most frequently when trying to save something.

A few years passed and I got an HP laptop running Windows XP.  It was a desktop replacement, a real powerhouse with a 17 inch screen.  It served me well, until one day the power cord wore the power jack off the motherboard and fried it.  It was time to get a new computer.  This was just after Macs started coming with Intel inside and Bootcamp was released for OS X.

I loved the shininess of the MacBook.  I loved the minimalist design.  I was skeptical though, I didn’t want to be hurt again.  I decided that Bootcamp would be my excuse.  If I hated OS X on the Mac, I could just run XP.

I took the plunge and bought the cheapest MacBook on Boxing Day at a rare $100 off.  I quickly fell in love.  I’ve been using the same MacBook ever since.  It’s getting old now; the hard drive is too small and it lags when I run too many web design apps.  I want a new one, but they’re so damned expensive.

In fact, I think I could use one of everything Apple sells.  That’s why I hate you Apple.  You’re so attractive with your simplicity and grace, but you’re just too damned expensive.  I realize you can sell iPods and iPhones and make a zillion percent markup, but teasing me is just not fair.  Tomorrow, you will release the iPad or iSlate or whatever and I will want one, but I will not buy one.  I will see others toying with the product that I don’t really need, but want so badly.  I hate you Apple.

Purpose: To learn what goes into having a website.

What’s Covered:

1. How the Internet Works: A crash course
2. Web Design
3. Hosting: Who, What, Why?
4. Domain Names

How the Internet Works: A crash course

If you’re reading this, you have a computer.  This is a good start.  You’re reading my website, but how did my site get to your computer?  I think the best way to describe the internet today is to think of the phone system.  Google is like an operator.  If you want to gather information from Bob, you can either ask the operator for Bob’s phone number or dial it yourself.  We can see now that a phone number is like a domain name, which we’ll discuss later.  Without a phone number, nobody can call you.  If nobody calls you, you won’t have a date for Saturday night.

Web Design

This really shouldn’t be the second section, but I want to get it over with because I think this is what most people know the most about.  A web designer is a computer programmer.  Like computer programs, web sites are written in computer code (HTML, PHP, etc.) and your web browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.) translates this into what you see on your screen.  Simplified, a web designers job is to take ideas for what a website will be and produce the code for use by the viewers computer.

Hosting

Hosting confuses a lot of people.  Remember that telephone network we imagined earlier?  It would be rather useless if nobody had a phone.  On the internet, computers are like phones.  If I want the data from another computer to view on my computer (which is what we’re doing when we access a web site) I have to connect to that computer.  A web host is a computer that holds a web site so that outside computers can access it.  Like renting a shop, there are many reasons to have a web host.  It is very uneconomical, frustrating and ineffective to host a website from your own computer, just as it would be to run a car dealership out of your home.  This is why we get web hosting and upload our site to a foreign computer (server) provided by our web host.

Domain Names

A domain name is an address.  Because the “location” of our site on the internet is something like 219.188.32.991, it is nice to have a more people friendly address, such as http://davis.wuolle.com.  When you view my site, you are really viewing something like the number above.  Because I have a domain name however, davis.wuolle.com is associated with that number and they become one in the same.

Lane 4 Logos:

My first experiment. Very modern, but certainly not right for this project.

Experiment number two. I actually really quite like this one and may stick with it.

Again very simple. I'm not so much a fan of this one, but I think it could have potential.