I have moved!

I now blog at http://markleggett.wordpress.com/

Cheers!
Mark

Tags!

I have gone through all of the previous posts on this blog and tagged everything for the Semester 2 Interactive Design Class with "Semester 2".

Everything for the Interactive Design Elective will be tagged "Electives".

Interactive Design - Day 22, Final Post!

Here is the address to the website, so feel free to click on it and have a wee look;

Otago Polytechnic Hospitality Servery

Username - guest

Password - 1234

(This will give you the same access as what a student will to the site.)

The site is not certainly not what I wanted to produce. One of my biggest mistakes was possibly not being more of a bossy jerk at the start.
In the interests of an open working environment, I allowed design choices to be decided on by myself and someone I had never worked with before, when I should have done that by myself.

If I had the time to do it all again, I would have made very strict templates for the look AND navigation, and made the other person stick to it religiously. Any mistakes/issues could be sorted after. Although I am certainly not an accomplished designer myself, I should have taken more control over that. Even in the last few hours I was finding that the layout was shifting around, as Adam tried hard to complete what he hadn't done previously. Trying to make a user guide while this became almost impossible, and with no progress being made in the last week except the last day and a half, I had to admit defeat, and accept how the site had turned out.

I had made a plan for the project to cover the first week and a half, which we stuck to, but the rest of the time once the site left my hands and was made in Joomla and HTML started to get messy. Not knowing what was going on technically, or how long it takes to do, meant that when productivity dropped on the other end of our "partnership", I had no idea.
It didn't help either when you are actually told that everything is fine, we are almost done, and that . When it turns out that's not the case, it's stressful.

We had planned and promised to have a working site ready for the staff and students around the second week. Because the "boy wonder" in our little dynamic duo did have a semi-working prototype going in the first week, this could and should have been possible. Not having done this meant no time for constructive feed back and adjustment. My idea was for this to be a purpose built solution for the Hospitality department, where all we have done in my opinion now is make just a website. I could have made that myself in Joomla, it's only a kitset approach to website construction, and found someone I can trust who knows HTML to help me do what I wanted.

The "Video" link was not my idea, and something that popped up last minute while I wasn't watching. I'm sure some staff will love it, no doubt the same staff that thought that all young people had broadband to load and watch the Youtube clips at home.
I hope having this doesn't hinder Tony's goal of producing DVD's for the students. I had asked to at least have the videos in some kind of order, but they are just thrown in there.

The calendar looks okay, but clicking on the days produces a pop up window that is unusable. I can see an important date, but not why it is important.

In hindsight I would have wanted at least one more person in the group, and someone I knew I could trust. I have struggled over the last two weeks with this blog, trying to put on a optimistic face and not turn this into a personal diary, while also wanting this to be an honest account of what I have been going through.

My only hope now is that the staff are not too unhappy with it, I am sure some of them will be happy, but it's just not as good as I know it could have been. Hopefully it is enough that they would be able to take it to more professional people to take it over and polish it.

I will probably look at it in month and not think it is that as bad as I do now, possibly the frustration of working on it has tainted my view somewhat. I know it's not a complete disaster, but we could have been at the point we are now much earlier, and then improved it more. I feel like I write for ages and never explain everything, so it's time to stop. Nevermind.

Cheers,
Mark Leggett.

UPDATE;
The login no longer works for some reason. Oh well...

Interactive Elective - Day 21

Just finishing up what I can, tidying up my part of the website and user guide and so on.

Since I started this blog by analyzing and critiquing websites, it's only fair that I have a fair and honest look at what the outcome of this project has produced, so that can be the last post here tomorrow.

Interactive Elective - Day 20

Well, I've reached the limits of what I can do with the User Guide. Certain elements that I wanted to explain are beyond me to understand, and it looks like I am flying solo from here. Due to the incomplete nature of the site, if I try and change something on the main page, I can't see what I have done because almost everything is now inaccessible.

I wish I had known how this was going to turn out, as I would probably been able to deliver a less sophisticated website solution, knowing from the start that I only had myself to rely on, or blame, but hindsight is always 20/20 I guess. Stupid old hindsight.

Interactive Elective - Day 19

The user guide is getting a little more under control, so I think that by Tuesday night I will be able to deliver a working guide to the Hospitality staff.
Although it will be text only,due to the size of the task and the looming deadline, I have tried to write everything in short simple steps that can be followed while using the website.

For example;

ADDING A NEW FILE.

1, Click on "New File".
2, Click "Upload a new file from your computer", and click "Next".
3, Click "Browse" to find the file located on your computer to be uploaded, and click "Submit".

ADDING MULTIPLE FILES.
To upload a folder of PDFs to the site, the folder must be "zipped", and contain no sub-folders.

1, Click "New File".
2, Click "Upload a new file from your computer", and click "Next".
3, Click "Browse" to locate the zipped folder located on your computer to be uploaded, tick the box marked "Batch" and click "Submit".

I seem to be writing the word "click" a lot, it's hard to to keep the terminology consistent, without repeating words and phrases.

"Click" to me seems to indicate a either physical keyboard key press or obvious button press, while "select" sounds better, but may not indicate actually activating the selected item, merely highlighting it. "Enter" might indicate pressing the Enter key on the keyboard, but this isn't how the interface for the administrators will always work.
Hopefully, using the term "click" will work best for non-computer users, which some of the Hospitality staff seem to be.

Interactive Elective - Day 18

If you visit the site now, you would see that nothing has changed since Thursday, it's still messed up and non-functioning.

I almost want to Flash animate a little tumbleweed that can blow through it every so often, maybe add a whistling wind noise so it actually sounds like the ghost town it is.

If it's possible to make the website in the last weekend, I can't understand why the person in charge of that didn't just make it in the first weekend, and then put his feet up. Unbelievable.

I was hoping to not only deliver a fantastic product to the client, but have something really good for a portfolio, but the chances of that happening are fairly slim now.

I debated whether to post what's happening right now, and had decided to keep everything as a draft, in case the other half of this "team" actually delivered on what was promised.
I have now decided to just post everything, to keep this as a free and honest "journal" of my experience during the last three weeks, without turning it into a personal feelings blog.

Interactive Elective - Day 16 and 17

I'm having a wee dilemma at the moment.
The amount of writing needed for the user guide is starting to balloon out of control like some kind of out of control balloonist. Every time I start writing about one thing, ten more things spring up that have to be explained too. It's not unexpected this would be the case, I thought this would take a week or so, but the dilemma is whether I add pictures to the user guide or not.

Sounds like a stupid thing to think about, adding pictures is fairly essential, but my choice in the short time left is either a brief, and possibly incomplete guide with pictures, versus a more comprehensive text based guide only.