I am a web designer!!!

So, the first and the most funny thing is to create a layout for my app. I think the best way to do this is simply draw on a piece of paper or a monitor, like below. There should be a lovely header, the german text which should be analysed by the app, the “wordlist” and the details about the selected word. Every word will be clickable, and according to this the “selected word textbox” will be changing.

The only problem is that there is some wasted space, so I re-designed the layout a bit. I also found out that displays’ are usually wider the higher, so it is reasonable to stretch it a bit to the left and to the right.

And finally there is need for welcome-page, where users can enter their German text. Just a textbox, a button or two, and some introducing text about the app.

Finding the right colours will be also a bit tricky. There is a lot of stuff out there about choosing colours, I’ve found two interesting resources: an infographics about color sentiments with some stats, and the Color Scheme Designer, which can help creating nice colour sets (and export them many formats).

Why do I need my own web app?

There are mainly two reasons to do this.

Firstly, I have a problem:

I’m learning German language and I’d like to improve my reading skills. The best way to do this is to read a lot. However, looking up words in the dictionary and writing word-lists on paper could be boring.

So, I need a nifty little app, which can create word lists from my German texts, save them or print them.

As far as I know, there are no tools like this out there.

The other thing is that building a web app is fun: one can learn a lot from this. It is worh knowing CSS, Javascript and some server side magic. Fortunately, there are lot of tools, tutorials and frameworks out there -- the hardest thing will be to choose the right one.

And, of course, I hope that at the end I will have some users, who will find my little app useful.

So let’s start!