Last push everyone, lets keep at it!

Bob
This week has been eventful to say the least. The meeting with Bob went fantastic. He provided us with plenty of great feedback about the design ideas that we presented to him & we even got a design signed off by Bob [progress]. Bob, though different to anyone that I have met before, has been helpful, considerate of our time scales & accommodating.

Regrettably, the CMS integration is proving to be little more difficult than Sue's research first indicated it would be; this coincided with a limited amount of time remaining is concerning me.

Chris
This concern has only been worsened by the non-reactive responses from Chris. I feel both disappointment & frustration towards Chris currently; though of course I would never let that affect how I deal with him.

When I arranged the meeting with him for Friday gone [5th December] I informed him that was leaving things a little late & that things had to progress before then. to aid this, I created an account with Getsignoff.com, emailed him the details & followed it up with a phone call to ensure that he understood the instructions & process involved; which has so far been three phone calls chasing him.

The great thing about getsignoff is that you can monitor client activity within the site. Unfortunately, this has only shown me that Chris hasn't even logged in yet! Needless to say this isn't great news.

When Friday came around, I was up early [as always] & called Chris to confirm the meeting. We agreed to put the meeting back 1hr to accommodate his travel; not a problem. Then less than an hour to the meeting (Viki & I had met & fanalising our approach for almost two hours at this point) my phone rang... it was Chris cancelling for 'personal reasons' & though a promise to get in touch with me over the weekend so far I have heard nothing.

I will follow it up with Chris tomorrow first thing with both an email & phone call; if need be I will go where ever he is to get sign off.

I am unwilling to let his lack of commitment to the project affect the teams performance. As mentioned earlier, Sue has her hands full with ensuring that Bob's project is ready for the usability testing on Thursday morning; which realistically means that it has to be finished for Wednesday to ensure that things run smoothly.

Usability Testing
The usability testing preparation is almost complete. Viki has prepared the qualitative, quantitative & demographic questionnaires alongside the consent form & tasks for the test subjects to complete at different stages of the test.

Whilst we are currently undergoing major stages of the project, it is vital that the lesser famed tasks do not fall by the wayside.

I have asked Gary to create the hand-over manual for Chris; this will form the starting point for the CMS orientated manual for Bob.

Whilst I appreciate that Christmas is just around the corner, we don't have long left & it has never been more important to retain focus, drive & motivation for the task(s) at hand. Lets keep up the hard work & we can do our selves proud!

Shaun Bellis - Project Manager

Progress!

Today was the meeting with Bob Milner regarding the designs that have been done for his website so far, Shaun contacted me a short while ago to let me know that Bob has chosen a final design and
we're finally in build mode for a website! Woo!

It feels nice to finally get to the point where we've pitched and successfully had a design chosen, there are still a few tweeks to be done - but still, the progress is great. Now it's my turn to really get stuck in and use a technology I've had little experience with - WordPress.

I'm looking forward to getting this build going and finished, so that when Chris chooses a design, we can solely concentrate on his project too. Timing couldn't be better at the moment, we're at the point where we've finished the pitching for the college projects, the eCards are done now (except for final tweaking on Gary's design), so we're ready to move on.

So my tasks for this week are:]

• familiarise myself with WordPress, its layout and how to incorporate it into a design.
• build the template for Bob's website.
  

We have signoff.com

Bob
GREAT NEWS! Bob has approved the below screen design concept; with a few tweaks of course. Bob's enthusiasm has proven to be a real asset during this project. There are a few things that Bob has asked for that are generally regarded as a 'no no' such as a splash page :-S which, despite my best efforts (and I am sure that Viki will agree) there is no detracting him from.

I am sure that the usability testing will highlight the splash page as an issue but until then Bob is sticking to his guns; to the point that he repeatedly renamed the 'splash page' and approached it from different angles.

The design that Bob has approved was a 'make weight' design to fill a void. This has reinforced what Steve has said about 'throwing a design in'.

I felt much more comfortable showing our idea's to Bob around my laptop in a conversational manor than stood in front of a projector with eyes on the presentation skills rather than just the designs.

The minutes from the meeting will be available later tonight.



Chris
Being a fan of the Boagworld Podcast I hear them bang on about getsignoff.com and just had to give it ago. Getsignoff.com is a free to use (basic package) web based application to aid the design approval process. The weakness of the application is commonly known as the client! I have noticed that Chris tends to me more reactive than proactive with this project & has unfortuntly taken some chasing throughout.

Time is moving on now & the next few weeks is going to prove to be extremely busy for us all; I can't wait!!

Almost there.....

I refer to the comment shaun made about there being 6 months left of the course. I make a similar comment "Shit there is only 5 college WEEKS until the end of this unit".

As I type this, Shaun and Viki are pitching our Ideas to Bob.

Design 1

Design 2

Design 3
http://picreative.co.uk/bob

I think design 1 is the most likely design to be chosen as it fits in with his publication. I think it stands out the most in terms of artistic value. I do however think there needs to be something a little more artistic to do with the navigation, in how the "pages are turned"

Design 3 I built on friday to take a little preasure off Sue, I am really happy how it came out. It is my personal favourate. It is pretty simple and plane, it puts the work in spot light. The design was origionally Shaun's I think the header and navigation really worked. After a little re-organisation of content and more thought as to how it would be displayed we came up with the final design.

I enjoyed building this mockup. It enabled me to practice my XHTML/CSS skills learnt in the last assignment.

I am now eagerly awaiting the resonse from bob. Hopefully we will know within the hour.

Christmas is soon

For last week I had to create a usability test for the designs, but it’s not like you can test the ease of the use of something that you can’t do anything with a part from look at. So the testing was more getting feedback on the designs. This is still a good thing because testing and feedback continuously thought the projects can only benefit the project. I did find it difficult to make up the testing for the design, as there is not a lot of questions I could think of for the designs.

I do think I could have done better with this testing but most of my attention was on my presentation this week. Now I think that I should have evened the time out between the tasks I had to do this week, as I have to re do the presentation so really it seems like I wasted some of my time putting my effort into the presentation, has that time could have been used better toward A10.

Wednesday I enjoyed getting to do the creative things but when I got my feedback for my presentation it kind of upset me so that took the focus off the creative work and made me lack confidence in the work I had to do. This year is so much harder than last year, and seems to be getting harder. It’s not just college that’s hectic at the moment, Christmas is soon so everyone’s stressing about that and it’s really busy at work, but at least I have my birthday to look forward to this week.

Surface Design Photos

Here are the pictures I took on Wednesday; I have saved the best one for last!

My designs..

Here are my designs for Chris at Wakefield Studios. There are more designs to come, but these two are the ones that are fully completed so far.

This first design is a clean and simple layout which tries to keep all emphasis on the photographs on display:

My second design is something more graphical, sometimes when photographs are on display, you need smart looking website so to help sell the work on show and this is what I have tried to do in the design below:



I am still coming up with ideas for Chris and will also add Bob's ideas during the remainder of this week. It's nice to be designing for something while being the developer too, but I think I have slight designer's block at the moment which needs snapping out of. My sketchbook has helped a lot with this and doodling lots of mini ideas is better than having none at all.

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Suzanne Hullah, Developer