CS50w Final Project

A little while ago, I finished CS50's Web Programming with Python and JavaScript. To complete the course, I needed to build a final project that demonstrated the skills I'd learned during the course. I really enjoy video games, so for my final project I decided to create a game review site for a game called Train Sim World 2. The game features some really amazing visuals, so I made sure to include lots of pictures of visuals. During the course I had really enjoyed using JavaScript, so I knew I wanted to include lots of JS rich features. Read on to see what I built!

How it works:

Styling and Structure

During the course we also learned about how to use the Bootstrap framework to help us quickly setup up a project's structure. I took several elements from bootstrap, including the image carousel and the navbar. This allowed me to quickly setup the main elements of the site before moving on to styling using CSS.

Media

Another big part of this project was acquiring all of the photos and videos shown on the website. To get these, I went into the game and took screenshots and screen captures of the game. I also had to make sure that I saved all of the media in the proper format.

Custom API

As I mentioned before, I wanted to include some features that displayed my knowledge of JavaScript. To do this, I wrote a custom API on my website's backend (Django) and called it using JavaScript on the frontend. You can see this system in action on the train fact compendium page.

Check it out

If you'd like to see the weather app in action for yourself, click the links below to the webpage and its Github repository:

The webpage

Github

Things I Could Improve:

Like my attack Helicopter sales page, the main thing I could do to improve this site is optimize it for mobile devices. The site looks good on pretty much all desktop and tablet screen sizes, but when put on a phone it warps and doesn't look quite right.

The other major area is the styling. I was still fairly new to web programming when I built this site, so I didn't know it was bad form to write any styling code inline. If I were to go back and do it again, I would definitely make sure to write all of my CSS in an external file.