Okay, we finally have the site up and all of it is just about working! Finally!! We met with Judie on Thursday just so she could look over the site and some of the content to see if we were doing it the way she wanted - she said she loved it and many people at her office agreed! We still have more that I wish we could have finished - setting up the classes/courses registration, setting them up with PayPal, and getting the photo album set up in the virtual tour that she wants. Luckily, this "project" won't be dropped in the summer and Melissa will have a team working on it to get it up to perfection. With the addition of DonorPerfect in the fall or spring of next year, this project will be able to serve Melissa's class for a long time!
I definitely thought that we would be done sooner than we were - but we had to continue with a lot of changes along the way. I learned the importance of starting things early and staying on task at all times. I also learned that it's not always easy to work in a team because people have a lot of other commitments and it's often hard to coordinate schedules. We were able to overcome this as a team and pull together to get the work done. I know that the team members often stayed up late and put many hours into making sure this project was successful. And though it did take a little longer than I expected, I really learned a lot about project/time management. Things don't always run smoothly and often take more time than expected. If I were to do another project, I would take that more into consideration and give our team a lot of extra time to get it done.
I used many skills that I learned throughout my time at FSU - a lot of HTML and Dreamweaver knowledge as well as use of graphic arts. I also used my writing and grammar skills that I've been taught since elementary school (and really do enjoy!) to make sure all the information was readable and easily understood. I definitely learned a lot more HTML and CSS skills just by watching others work on their parts of the project. Looking over the code was very helpful in getting my web design skills up.
I took away many things from this project - the main thing being that working on teams take a lot of commitment and time management skills. If one person is off, even a little, it throws the entire team off and people often have to do more than they should. I also learned how rewarding it can be to have a satisfied client - Judie was very happy with our redesign and that fact that we won't be abandoning her in the summer. This project was a good learning experience for me, showing me what it will be like to work with clients and sponsors in "the real world". Overall, I felt the project went very well and though I wish we had a couple more weeks, this is a good stopping point for our team. It's time to pass it on to another group of students who will hopefully want as much success for kidsincorporated.org as we did.
View our Project Plan and Gantt Chart.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
April 22, 2007 Post - Project Closeout
Okay, we finally have the site up and all of it is just about working! Finally!! We met with Judie on Thursday just so she could look over the site and some of the content to see if we were doing it the way she wanted - she said she loved it and many people at her office agreed! We still have more that I wish we could have finished - setting up the classes/courses registration, setting them up with PayPal, and getting the photo album set up in the virtual tour that she wants. Luckily, this "project" won't be dropped in the summer and Melissa will have a team working on it to get it up to perfection. With the addition of DonorPerfect in the fall or spring of next year, this project will be able to serve Melissa's class for a long time!
I definitely thought that we would be done sooner than we were - but we had to continue with a lot of changes along the way. I learned the importance of starting things early and staying on task at all times. I also learned that it's not always easy to work in a team because people have a lot of other commitments and it's often hard to coordinate schedules. We were able to overcome this as a team and pull together to get the work done. I know that the team members often stayed up late and put many hours into making sure this project was successful. And though it did take a little longer than I expected, I really learned a lot about project/time management. Things don't always run smoothly and often take more time than expected. If I were to do another project, I would take that more into consideration and give our team a lot of extra time to get it done.
I used many skills that I learned throughout my time at FSU - a lot of HTML and Dreamweaver knowledge as well as use of graphic arts. I also used my writing and grammar skills that I've been taught since elementary school (and really do enjoy!) to make sure all the information was readable and easily understood. I definitely learned a lot more HTML and CSS skills just by watching others work on their parts of the project. Looking over the code was very helpful in getting my web design skills up.
I took away many things from this project - the main thing being that working on teams take a lot of commitment and time management skills. If one person is off, even a little, it throws the entire team off and people often have to do more than they should. I also learned how rewarding it can be to have a satisfied client - Judie was very happy with our redesign and that fact that we won't be abandoning her in the summer. This project was a good learning experience for me, showing me what it will be like to work with clients and sponsors in "the real world". Overall, I felt the project went very well and though I wish we had a couple more weeks, this is a good stopping point for our team. It's time to pass it on to another group of students who will hopefully want as much success for kidsincorporated.org as we did.
I definitely thought that we would be done sooner than we were - but we had to continue with a lot of changes along the way. I learned the importance of starting things early and staying on task at all times. I also learned that it's not always easy to work in a team because people have a lot of other commitments and it's often hard to coordinate schedules. We were able to overcome this as a team and pull together to get the work done. I know that the team members often stayed up late and put many hours into making sure this project was successful. And though it did take a little longer than I expected, I really learned a lot about project/time management. Things don't always run smoothly and often take more time than expected. If I were to do another project, I would take that more into consideration and give our team a lot of extra time to get it done.
I used many skills that I learned throughout my time at FSU - a lot of HTML and Dreamweaver knowledge as well as use of graphic arts. I also used my writing and grammar skills that I've been taught since elementary school (and really do enjoy!) to make sure all the information was readable and easily understood. I definitely learned a lot more HTML and CSS skills just by watching others work on their parts of the project. Looking over the code was very helpful in getting my web design skills up.
I took away many things from this project - the main thing being that working on teams take a lot of commitment and time management skills. If one person is off, even a little, it throws the entire team off and people often have to do more than they should. I also learned how rewarding it can be to have a satisfied client - Judie was very happy with our redesign and that fact that we won't be abandoning her in the summer. This project was a good learning experience for me, showing me what it will be like to work with clients and sponsors in "the real world". Overall, I felt the project went very well and though I wish we had a couple more weeks, this is a good stopping point for our team. It's time to pass it on to another group of students who will hopefully want as much success for kidsincorporated.org as we did.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
April 17, 2007 Post
We have been doing a LOT of work on the website in the past week. We added a border around the outside to get rid of the "floating" affect. I have done most of the parts of my assigned pages - the services and events section of the site highlighting the things that Kids Inc offers the community and the kind of kid-related events they offer. I put some pictures on some of my pages as well, to help draw in the audience. My next blog entry will be my close out one once our group has met with Judie and Melissa one last time. We are going to try and meet either Wednesday or Thursday with Judie to show her the pages and see what she thinks about them. Right now, due to the amount of content on the pages, I have put in anchors to make it easier to view. I don't know if Judie will like it or would prefer it another way.
Sunday, April 8, 2007
April 8, 2007 Post
We had another meeting with Judie on Friday - Rigel, Zach, and I. We showed her the newly update site and she really liked it. We worked on changing some things - the color and background color of the side navigation, the text, the text style, the color of the banners on the logo and boxes, and some other minor details. I know that Rigel has been working on making the page a template and is having some issues. He couldn't get the header/footer thing that Melissa talked about to work. Once we get that taken care of, we just have to plug in all the content which won't be too hard. I have most of it all ready to go on and all the publications in PDF format. The pages I will be responsible for are the Services Page (with Eagle's Nest, School Readiness Express, and Early Head Start) and two others.
I am so ready to get this page up and running for them! We only have about 11 days left in the semester and then we will be finished. Luckily, Melissa is teaching this class through the summer and will still be able to help Judie out with more website stuff and the database system in the fall.
We still have to rework on the Quality Measures - I was thinking that Data Clarity, Overall Design, Data Organization, Ease of Usability, and Ease of Update(in the long run) would all be good measures to judge our performance.
Look at the web site's progress here - http://kids.infotogo.net/
I am so ready to get this page up and running for them! We only have about 11 days left in the semester and then we will be finished. Luckily, Melissa is teaching this class through the summer and will still be able to help Judie out with more website stuff and the database system in the fall.
We still have to rework on the Quality Measures - I was thinking that Data Clarity, Overall Design, Data Organization, Ease of Usability, and Ease of Update(in the long run) would all be good measures to judge our performance.
Look at the web site's progress here - http://kids.infotogo.net/
Sunday, April 1, 2007
April 1, 2007 Post
Our meeting with Judie went very well. We showed her the site (ran into some printing issues where it wouldn't print out any color or borders). She liked most of it - she did NOT like the navigation on the side and asked for a few more things. She would like a blueish background and keep the boxes white. She felt the site the way it was is a little too white and some color would do it good. We have to update the Classes part of the site so we can have it the way it is on the current site. I will be asking Melissa about how to do this sometime this week because I'm at a loss. When people register non-securely online, it sends an email with payment information to Kids Inc and they enter it into the database.
Judie also told me they will be going with Donor Perfect but not until later in the fall, possibly September. This will give them lots of time to get things set up - it will still take the six weeks to set everything up.
The site has been updated and still needs a lot of work. I'm starting to worry we won't get this done in time - we only have 13 days left. I hope we can pull it all together. I have all the information organized and ready to go up on the site.
Judie also told me they will be going with Donor Perfect but not until later in the fall, possibly September. This will give them lots of time to get things set up - it will still take the six weeks to set everything up.
The site has been updated and still needs a lot of work. I'm starting to worry we won't get this done in time - we only have 13 days left. I hope we can pull it all together. I have all the information organized and ready to go up on the site.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
March 25, 2007 Post
The prototype site is now much more compatible in all browsers. We ran into some weird issues where the picture on the banner would move as well as the navigation buttons (only in IE 7 though). Sometimes, the boxes themselves would move but everything looked fine in Firefox. It's weird how that happens - makes it very difficult to design web pages! We've tried it in Opera and Safari as well - it all works fine.
We have a meeting with Judie this Friday at 1pm. We're going to show her the site we have so far and keep her up to date with where we will be next week.
We have a meeting with Judie this Friday at 1pm. We're going to show her the site we have so far and keep her up to date with where we will be next week.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
March 18, 2007 Post
The prototype site has gone up on Rigel's account - here is the link
https://campus.fsu.edu/bbcswebdav/users/rkt03/it_project/prototype/kidsinc.html
It still needs work - we have to fix the buttons on the top (they were supposed to transfer over with white borders but that didn't work for some reason). All of the graphics had to be resized for the web. The site is on our school server right now - we got access to Melissa's work server but haven't transfered it over there yet. When we all tried, we ran into a couple connection issues and haven't resolved them yet.
We should have a meeting with Judie next week to show her what we are doing so far.
https://campus.fsu.edu/bbcswebdav/users/rkt03/it_project/prototype/kidsinc.html
It still needs work - we have to fix the buttons on the top (they were supposed to transfer over with white borders but that didn't work for some reason). All of the graphics had to be resized for the web. The site is on our school server right now - we got access to Melissa's work server but haven't transfered it over there yet. When we all tried, we ran into a couple connection issues and haven't resolved them yet.
We should have a meeting with Judie next week to show her what we are doing so far.
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