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.

View our Project Plan and Gantt Chart.