1/19/10- 15-5's

1/19/2010

Team Assigned Task: The first thing that our group decided on our first night of class was to participate in a virtual meeting via a program called DimDim on Saturday, January 16. At this meeting it was decided that Kristy would serve as our project manager and that I would serve as the web designer. As web designer, my team-assigned task for the week was to develop a shell for our team webpage. The creation of the shell of the webpage took nearly 8 hours. I experienced several complications with this task. The first one was a page size problem. Every time I re-sized the page, the text and navigation would become unreadable and disorganized. To resolve this issue, I created a new page that had “fixed” boarders. This keeps all the page elements and text where I intended them to be. The next major issue I had was with the spry toolbar that I used for navigational purposes. The spry bar would not work properly in all Internet browsers and I could not find a way to keep the selected tab highlighted. As such, I created a new version of the website, that used fish looking buttons for navigation that I created in PowerPoint. Upon reviewing with my team, we decided to go with the fish navigation version of the website. I would say that I have 100% completed the shell of the website. Later on, I spent one and a half hours updating the bio page, project description, intended audience, and schedule. While doing this, I had some issues in updating the new files and had to create a new folder for the project. The next day I spent about 30 minutes updating bio information and worked on finding a solution to the page-updating problem. The next steps with this task will be to continue to update the page as more information becomes available. As an entirety, the website is only 50% complete and will be in progress for the duration of this project.

Reflection: I completed a shell for our team website and updated team and project information. This assignment is due by January 21 at 11:55pm. This project is finished and I will be able to turn it in on time. Creating this webpage shell was important because this webpage will serve as an important tool for organizing our teams files and presenting our teams work. The skills I had to use for this assignment were similar to the skills that I had to use when creating webpages for IDT 7090. The skills that I used for creating this webpage shell can, and probably will, be used by me in the future for other projects or products. The process for creating this website was very similar to the process I have used in the past. I probably could have been more efficient if I would not have tried to use the spry tools and if I would have started with a fixed page from the beginning. I believe the design and the appearance of the website was designed well. However, I think that I need to improve on my overall approach to creating websites. Unfortunately, because I am still new to creating webpages, there is still a lot of trial and error. This trail and error is inefficient and time consuming. My next steps are to continue to work with the website so I will be more efficient as new information and new pages are added to the site.