What I'm Doing Now.

Hello everyone,

Since I have finished the course I have been doing very busy!

First of all I have been doing a few freelance projects for family and friend’s businesses and have also been concentrating on my web hosting business; Hydro Host.

I am so glad I chose to do the HND Interactive Media course. It has allowed me to further my skills ready for this industry and has enabled me to think about what I want to do with my life. I am very happy with the grades which I received but am considering topping it up to a BA at some point in the future. I think I just want a few years out getting more experience before I go and do the top up.

I wish all of the new and current students of the HND Interactive Media/FDA Web Design course at Wakefield College the very best of luck and success. If anyone needs any help please feel free to contact me either through das forum or eMail through my portfolio. Alternatively you can read through my Online Learning Journal to get an insight into my leaning throughout the course.

Looking back through the journals of past students was highly influential and useful to my progression on the course.

If anyone needs cheap web hosting whilst they are on the course look no further, www.hydro-host.net. Also if you enter the coupon code WAKCOL91 at the cart you will receive 12% off all web hosting plans.

All The Best,
Gary

Affordable Web Hosting:
www.hydro-host.net

12% Student Discount Coupon Code: WAKCOL91

Last weeks usability testing

Even though Christmas is nearly a week away I don’t feel like it is. I usually look forward to Christmas as I get to see all my family but this year I am not. I feel like I have loads of work to do. I still haven’t finished my CSS assignment, I still have some touching up bits to do. With the CSS work if I get a problem I don’t usually know how to fix it and if I done fix them it takes me hours.

The usability testing went good this week, it was quiet boring and I couldn’t do it as a full time job. It was good to get a go at doing it though. As I had set up most of the usability testing I got to read out the questions and guide the users though the web sites with the help of Gary and Shaun. I was abit nervous because I hate reading out aloud.

The software that Shaun downloaded was really useful, there was only one person who said they didn’t want to be videoed which was fine and she actually give us a lot of good written feedback.

The team work seems to be going really well and I have enjoyed it, I wish if we had more time on the course so we could have done the team assignment on it own.

Usability Testing

Usability Testing

Such an eye opening experience! I think that we all agreed that the usability gave us a much valued insight into how people use not only the sites that we have built but the internet in general.

The feedback that we got from the users proved to be very useful.

A large part of my time has been spent waiting for the videos to export from Silverback into .mov ready to upload to a video sharing site for all to see.

The Silverback application has proven to be an invaluable (though it sells for $49.95 ;-) ) & I would recommend it to anyone doing this kind of work; providing they have a Mac of course.

... more to come.

--
Usability is like oxygen - you don't notice it until it's missing.

CMS nightmare!

Building Bob's website this week has been very very challenging! This is the first time that I have ever touched Wordpress, so trying to figure out how it was to integrate into a website using CSS and PHP was beyond me at first. I don't know if I was just too tired when I first looked at the coding for the CMS, but for some reason, the next day when I tried to sort things out - it worked!

This week has been the biggest learning curve for me, firstly getting to grips with the CMS and then also dabbling with the PHP side of things. Customising headers and footers so that content can be generated is tricky and I've still to get the images page to work as we designed it to.

Once problem I have had to encounter this week was concerning images. Putting a background image on things like the header div didn't want to work, which mean our header image and rollover images didn't show up. This problem took me quite a while to sort out, I had to insert the image into the xhtml for it to work properly, which meant that the rollover hovers won't work now because the CSS required them as a background image. It's a small sacrifice when you consider the amount of time and effort that has gone into building this one page.

I've still got a considerable amount of work to be doing, firstly I've got to finish off building the remaining pages to Bob's website and write up a user manual for him. Then when Chris has chosen a design, I need to commence building that website too. We've haven't got much time left before client handover now and I need to be thinking about my evaluation. I would really like my Christmas holidays to be a relaxing time, so would like to get most of the work out of the way for our group submission in January.

The time has gone so fast over the past 3 months, it almost seems unreal to think that around 12 weeks ago, we were just returning to college after the summer holidays.

UPDATE!

We have progress! Watch this space!

UPDATE: I have called Chris & we will have sign off by noon today with all the content by tomorrow! This is fantastic news! His initial thoughts are between 'Design A' & 'Design B' (see below)


UPDATE 12:06: Chris has signed off of design A (see above).

PANIC!!!

I can't really say I was surprised to find out that Chris had let us down again. This puts us in a really bad position. We have so much to do but we obviously can't get on with it until we get signed off.

I have scheduled Tuesday to work on the projects.

Things to do:

User Manual (Chris)
New Design for Chris
Pick out ideas generation for the submission folder.
Start Evaluation

I am happy with the way the build for Bob is looking. However there is a little alignment thing to change. The text should start from where the "Home" link is in the navigation.

Usability testing week

On Monday Bobs meeting went well, there were a few things that Shaun had to talking Bob out of having, but apart from that signing off of the design was quiet simple. One of the things that Bob wanted was a splash page, Shaun said in a nice way that he couldn’t have it but Bob still wanted one then Shaun said they were out of date and he still wanted one. In the end whatever Shaun said didn’t make a difference he really wanted a kind of splash page, and if the client wants it you have to make it.

Bob seemed to really enjoy the meeting and that helped as he gave good feedback and told us everything he wanted.

Chris hasn't been as helpful as Bob this week, the meeting we had planned on Friday he was 1 hour late and then he canceled. I kind of think that he had no intension of coming to the meeting and that was quiet annoying, I would of preferred it if he had said in the first place he couldn’t make it to a meeting and we could have sorted something else out. Now we have to wait till he has chosen the design he likes then we can get on with building it and then testing.

The usability testing is going good, I have the main parts finished I just have to make some more questions and tasks. The usability test as been designed for testing both Bob and Chris’s websites, so alteration to how testing will be done will not need to be changed.