EVALUATION

I went into this brief with a definitive idea of what I wanted to get out of it from the start. I knew that I wanted a portfolio website and I thought that this brief would be the perfect opportunity to achieve this. I was very interested in what I was going to come out of the brief with and the research was definitely secondary.

This soon changed when I realized that I would need to do quite a bit of technical research into how I was going to make the site, what portfolio sites contain and the reasons people have them. My initial focus was on the various methods I could use to make the website and then secondly the aesthetics of the site. Most of this website was done using the Internet by looking at other portfolio websites and blogs that I liked and then for the more technical information I was looking at online tutorials. I soon realized that simply focusing on the technical & aesthetic side, wouldn’t result in the best website. I then started using the library as more of a research resource by looking through their magazine back catalog and books. I found this a reliable and useful resource and one that I will definitely use more in the future. This got me thinking about the importance of planning when it comes to creating a website. It meant that I could plan out how my website was going to function before I even opened Dreamweaver. This turned out to be a crucial stage in my research and development and did make the whole process a lot easier.

Most of my research was self-driven using the Internet or library resources but I wouldn’t say that this was the most effect. Instead I found that the sessions I had on CSS and Flash really helped me to get a deeper understanding of the technical side. It also helped talking to other people on the course doing the same sort of projects because we were mostly encountering similar problems. I found that research done when trying to overcome a problem forces you to think harder and dig deeper to try and find a solution. It is also the sort of research that stays with you for longer and makes a more lasting impact.

In terms of my production methods I definitely made the right choice by going with Dreamweaver and CSS. I made this decision after trying to create an introduction animation in flash that I could use as a menu in flash or even go on to make a whole flash website. However I struggled to make it work how I envisaged and through my previous research I found that the simpler and more concise a portfolio website is the easier it will be for users to get an idea about you and your work (unless of course you’re a web designer etc). This led me back to Dreamweaver and CSS and helped me settle on a simpler design. This research was formed through trail and error and can only come at the doing/production stage of a project. Personally I think this is the most effective and memorable form of research.

Using the blog as an online sketchbook has now become my preferred method of documenting a project and I couldn’t see any other logical way of documenting a project like this, where it’s based around the Internet. As always I think that I could have done more research but I believe that you get to a point in your project where you get too focused on the final outcome and the research drifts into the background. Even though this was meant to be a research project I don’t think I’ve ever seen it like that because I knew that I wanted to produce a portfolio website and that’s always been my main drive. I think that my website is a fair representation of what I have learnt through this project and I know that I wouldn’t have been able to do this before the brief. I have learnt a whole new realm of web design, CSS and if I were to produce another website I would use it again. With that said I know that I have only touched the surface when it comes to web design but the whole project has helped me to understand that I don’t want to go any deeper.

My rationale behind the brief was that I wanted to create a portfolio website. It is this that has driven the research and I haven’t really deviated away from this throughout the whole project. All of the research has been directed towards the single goal of producing a portfolio website and not particularly because I want to have a better understanding of web design etc. This may seem a bit narrow minded but as the project developed I have seen it as a means to an end. There was a small element of exploration with this brief, as I wanted to see if I would like to take web design any further in the future. As I’ve stated before this isn’t the case, so I have come out of the project with a clearer view of where I sit as a practitioner.

As each brief goes past I think I am getting a better idea of what you need to do to effectively plan a project. However with this brief I thought I could get a lot more done in the timeframe than I actually did. With this sort of project you spend a lot of time sat in front of a computer and it is very self-contained. I think it is very easy to tired or bored of the project. This was mainly my fault as I would have liked to be at the position I am now (with the site online and functioning) a lot earlier so I could have focused more on generating some more content to actually go on the website. Another aspect for future projects would be that I don’t make consistent posts on my blog and I leave them to build up and then I have to try and remember things that I did. In the future I want it to be a more consistent and regular process and I think this will reflect in better, more coherent research. This is just something that I’m going to have to keep in mind and I don’t want to forget about putting content onto my site.

With all this said I am very pleased with what I have achieved in this brief and I feel I have created a website that fits all my needs and requirements. I am viewing the site as an ongoing work in progress as there are a few things I am considering changing but I am glad that I have a working framework online that I can build onto.

Testing my website

I almost forgot to test my site on a variety of different computers and crucially on a PC. Luckily one of my housemates owns a PC (I can't remember the last time I used one) so i used his computer to ave a look at my site. It all worked fine including the blog feed, which was the aspect i was most worried about. The only slight problem is that i think i may have made the everything on the site slightly too large. Well to be more specific too tall as the width seems to be fine. This isn't the biggest problem in the world as most of my pages don't have many images and text together the crucial thing is that the menu bar isn't too wide. I think this may be down to the fact that i have made the site on my MacBook Pro, which has quite a large screen when compared to smaller MacBooks.

La Roux's Website

The singer La Roux has got a cool new flash website check it out. This is the sort of thing I cant even begin to get my head around and I really do have a new found appreciation for how difficult it is to make a really cool and exciting website. It seems that a lot of the focus when it comes to bands and singers websites is to make the experience of visiting their website exciting and memorable and not just for the music. I guess this is the same for every website, you want to be remembered but in terms of a portfolio website and mine in particular is that i want to use it more as a resource that i can give to people when I'm enquiring about work or work placements. What it really comes down to in my case is the quality of work and displaying it in the best way possible.

http://www.laroux.co.uk/

Another cool one is Becks that James Rhodes showed me: http://www.beck.com/default.aspx

other work

It was also commented on that I had only put up my photographs onto my site. So I think I am going to have to create at least one more page for other work that is photography and then even a video a page if I decide that hosting my videos on vimeo doesn't work for me. I think that i will just keep a consistent theme, so however my photos are displayed it will be the same for my other work. So i will just scan or take photos of any 3d work or use jpegs etc and either have them as thumbnails or in a flash gallery depending on what i decide. Example of a scan below:

Extra Feedback

I showed my housemates my website because most of them haven't seen or been involved in the process of me making it, in order to get a bit of feedback about how my site functions and looks.

On the whole people said that it does work and there isn't much i need to change about it. They said that the buttons worked well and overall said navigating the site was relatively easy. I think this is mainly down to the fact that there isn't much to my site and it is relatively simple. I proposed my ideas about changing the layout of the photos and it went down well as they thought it might look a bit more professional than the thumbnails I'm currently using. This was mainly down to the fact that they didn't like a new tab popping up every time they clicked on a new image. They thought the changes i made to my blog feed really worked well and made it look more like it is part of the website as opposed to an obvious feed. Finally they said that they were not too sure about having the landing page and then the homepage. They thought that both of these pages looked too similar. So I think I will have to include a small bit of text on the homepage, just briefly explaining who I am and what i do. With this said though i don't want to include too much info because this would take away from the point of having an about me page. Or I could simply get rid of the landing page but i don't really want to do that because I think the photo works really well with the logo and the content of the photo works really well as an opening image.

Possible changes to portfolio page

I am not entirely happy with the way i have displayed my photos on my website and from the final crit/discussion I discovered that Andy had found a cool way using Adobe Lightroom. This program lets you import your photos and create a flash gallery, which seems to work very smoothly on Andy's site. I think I'm going to download a free trial version from the adobe site and give it a go and see if I prefer the results to the thumbnail version I've got now.

Changes to the blog page

After getting a bit of feedback about my site the blog page and the portfolio page were the two main issues that came up. Firstly I decided to change my blog page because this was something i was planning on doing anyway. I found out that you could apply css styles that other people have created and I found that I could do this on the rss feed site I used.



The site has over 50 different styles that you can preview applied to your blog and you then have the opportunity to change the code and see how the changes affect the blog.



I wanted to have something that was very simple and clean so guess what i picked the style called simple black on white and then adapted the colours to match what already exists on my website. I also really like the dashed border and think the blog page needs it to contain the blog.

This is what the blog looked unstyled:



And this is what it currently looks like, vastly improved and looks a lot clearer and clean:



I have found that it doesn't change the spacing between the title and posts, which is annoying but i have worked out that this only looks bad when the title is followed by a video. So in the future I am going to do all the writing for my posts first and then post any photos or videos after. There may be a way around this but it's not the biggest problem i've got with the website.