Wednesday, August 6, 2014

I'm done!

It's 12am now and I'm officially done!

I uploaded my website online as well, you can go HERE.


So I'm pretty okay with the outcomes, could be better. Okay honestly, it could be WAYYY better. There are a few bugs I don't think I have enough time to troubleshoot, but it's alright I guess. Honestly, nobody in their right mind would use RF while it's still in its preview version to build an entire site. 

Total time taken to complete the site: 36 Hours 
In the span of a week.
Now for the documentation. Since I have been referencing throughout my blog posts, I have just made it so much easier to compile all of them!

So anyway, here's my self reflection. I wrote it in a restaurant while I was waiting for my lunch at 4pm. (slept at 5am because of this) <--slightly poor time management.



SELF REFLECTION

      What have I learned? First, I learned how to scope for suitable programs that would fit the need of my personal brief of responsive websites. As part of my self-learning initiative, I learned the basics through online tutorials on Youtube and read comments and reviews on the programs on StackOverflow and such. I realised that Adobe MUSE wasn't going to be an option because it did not support responsive sites. So I opted with Adobe Edge Reflow.

Although the online tutorials were helpful, they did not address the many bugs and problems I discovered when I actually started to execute my site. My method of learning would be through trial and error as I have very little patience with lengthy instructions. I needed to see the result of my actions immediately, and that is how I learn from them.

    For the designing part of my self-learning, I learned to design interfaces for many different sizes of the same content. I'm glad to practice this as our classes do not expose us much to mobile interface design. With users using more of mobiles and less of desktops to surf the net (CNNMoney, 2014), I feel like this is a very needed exercise to test my skills of versatility.
As for my personal style, I have finally had the opportunity to execute what I feel describes me best. I have two interfaces of the website which are textured and another which is more solid and clean. This would represent my admiration for both realistic and solid designs.

Self-critiquing is also one of the key learning which I hoped I polished through this assignment. I learned to critique my design and evaluate on what makes a website user friendly and visually pleasing.

Now, for the programming area of my self-learning exercise. With this very unstable Preview program filled with bugs and limited resources, I have learned how to hack the functions in order to solve my problems although it may not be the most efficient way of doing so. I had trouble with hiding the elements I don't want to see on the mobile version but wanted to see on the desktop version. To fix this quickly, I just scaled them down to 0% to achieve that. Therefore, problem solving has been a large criteria of learning in this assignment.

As for time management, I always try to make sure that I divide my time equally over a steady pace between work and leisure/rest. I realised that I am less efficient and alert when I try too work for long hours. So, I would frequently take short breaks and rest to regain my enthusiasm. Other than this, I know myself very well that I could never produce a good work at the last minute. So, throughout the week, I paced myself to complete an achievable 10% of this work every day. I planned to have one day extra just in case I needed it. I this case, I have used it since I completed the assignment just on the day itself.

In conclusion, this project's aim is that it may or may not be submitted to the AWWWARDs competition. My final verdict of actually submitting this award would be : not yet. I feel like there's much to improve in the design and programming before I could showcase and introduce myself to the marketplace.



References

O'Toole, J. (2014). Mobile apps overtake PC Web usage in U.S.. [online] CNNMoney. Available at: http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/28/technology/mobile/mobile-apps-internet/ [Accessed 6 Aug. 2014].

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