Evaluation

I started the project for “Designing of the Internet” on the 8th of February and finished it on the 16th of May. In the following Evaluation I will be mentioning the difficulties I faced throughout the procedure of creating the website, how I could have improved it and my progress in the field of designing for the Internet. In addition I will be talking about my project management skills development and my personal “highlights” of this module.

After struggling to find a good concept for a while, I finally found an idea that excited me and seemed realistic. I created the website about a fictitious club that I opened in Kingston. My aim was to create a website with a very elegant and professional layout and therefore chose to work with Photoshop. I firstly tried to create layouts in Dreamweaver but felt I could only use limited fonts and could not really be as creative as I wished to be. I then changed to Photoshop and created a few different home layouts. I could see that my skills in Photoshop were developing after every layout that I created and after a while when I felt confident with the program I tried to create the final layout for my homepage. Keeping the main home layout in mind I created the other four layouts, as I wanted all 5 pages to have a consistent look.

To put the layouts in Dreamweaver was a big task. I sliced the single graphics/text boxes in Photoshop and opened them in Dreamweaver; I hid the text in Photoshop as I wanted to add the text through html and not as an image. I had to reorganise the slices a lot and many images were appearing blurred or were having other graphic mistakes, which caused me many problems. It was very time consuming to finally have all five pages in Dreamweaver with no mistakes and to have everything on its right place.

After organising all the pages in Dreamweaver and inserting the text I decided to add the web banners that I created in After Effects and also add the music. I faced many difficulties to adjust the web banners into my pages, as I did not create a separate “slice” for it in Photoshop. I could luckily put the banners at the bottom of the pages, which did not look bad to me. I added the music through the “embedded” tag in html. I chose Dennis Ferrer’s song “hey hey” as it’s a club/dance song yet it’s not too distracting.

I really enjoyed the fact that I could use my knowledge from the previous modules like Digital media and Motion Graphics, in which I learnt how to work with After Effects, Flash and Photoshop and combine them with Dreamweaver and create one project. I tried to put in all my digital media skills together and create a website which I personally like. I created “crystal” the way I planned on and therefore I am satisfied with the outcome although I could have definitely improved the website by putting in “roll over images” or more graphics. Working with all these different programs and also updating the blogs at the same time was very challenging at first and I could not understand how I could link these programs together and make the website look professional but through the tutorials on Studyspace and other online recourses I learnt a lot.

Uploading the website to the server:

The biggest difficulty that I had was uploading the website on to the server studentnet.kingston.ac.uk. Firstly the server was not connecting therefore I had to wait 3 days in order to contact the tech-guys on Monday (today) and then when we finally managed to upload the website; the links, music and banners did not work. With help of my tutors, a very strong will power and a lot of patience and time I managed to make most of the website work on the server although I faced many difficulties and it took me more than 12 hours to make it work! The banners were still not working, I tried everything that I could think of and finally after exchanging a few emails with my tutor Fleeta, we arranged a meeting in the media lab and solved the banners-issues and made the entire website finally work perfectly. The main problem was that the entire folder of my website was over 15mb so through deleting some jpegs and After Effect files File zilla could upload the missing banners. In future I know to only try to upload the necessary files and make sure that I don't underestimate the procedure of uploading the website to the server and do it at least a week before deadline. However I am very glad that the entire website is working and feel that I truly learnt a lot of skills in this module such as time keeping, planning, independent study, communicating with tutors and last but not least, solving problems.