As I'd stated in my initial post about the brief, I was expecting this to be a challenging assignment to do as it entailed learning a lot of new technical skills in order to complete the website. I quickly got stuck into doing side projects of my own, trying to learn my way around HTML and CSS after a few lessons and tutorials writing up simple websites. This spurred me on to do sketchbook work (brainstorming, visual language, styling and sketching etc) and get ideas down for my wireframes etc. By doing this early on and deciding on where I wanted to go with the site made the process a lot smoother than it could have been. Unfortunately I ended up having to change my design due to a design vs technical hiccup. Fortunately I had thought of a simpler design that would work responsively so I went with that.
Production:
I was eager to continue designing after having a go at doing a side project by myself. I quickly got addicted to coding due to its constant problem solve nature. Its fun learning how to put the bricks together and take it apart, and then rebuild it again. Less challenging in some aspect was the iBook which I began working on a couple of weeks after the website. I felt because there was a lack of technical difficulty with this one that I had to make my layouts, imagery and all other visual language extra special to get the attention of the examiners.
Post-pro:
After I'd finished creating my iBook and Website I went onto do validating/accessibility tests. I used W3C markup validator service to search for any problems within my code that I needed to iron out before user testing began. Once this was done I used a variety of people to use my website. In a previous post called "User testing" you can see the screen recordings and my reviews of how things went. It was very important to do the user testing and I feel it has boosted my confidence in my design quite substantially. I also feel it will be very valuable later on when I could be working in a Ue/Ux team. This was in fact one of my favourite parts of the web process as it gave me some really good feedback on how things physically worked not just about how it looked.
This has definitely been my favourite project of the year, it been much more technically challenging due to learning HTML and CSS. I found the iBooks author fun to use also, but i don't think its something I'll find as valuable as learning how to code a website. I feel I've worked well with iBooks alongside my website which was something I thought I'd struggle with. I think the schedule and having a weekly 'to do' list has really helped me keep focused.
Post-pro:
After I'd finished creating my iBook and Website I went onto do validating/accessibility tests. I used W3C markup validator service to search for any problems within my code that I needed to iron out before user testing began. Once this was done I used a variety of people to use my website. In a previous post called "User testing" you can see the screen recordings and my reviews of how things went. It was very important to do the user testing and I feel it has boosted my confidence in my design quite substantially. I also feel it will be very valuable later on when I could be working in a Ue/Ux team. This was in fact one of my favourite parts of the web process as it gave me some really good feedback on how things physically worked not just about how it looked.
This has definitely been my favourite project of the year, it been much more technically challenging due to learning HTML and CSS. I found the iBooks author fun to use also, but i don't think its something I'll find as valuable as learning how to code a website. I feel I've worked well with iBooks alongside my website which was something I thought I'd struggle with. I think the schedule and having a weekly 'to do' list has really helped me keep focused.
