For this assignment, I decided to take a different approach to how I usually build websites and tried a fully scalable, liquid design. I had never previously built a fully percentage-based design before, so I thought this would be quite an interesting challenge to provide myself with.
However, building a liquid design caused me a lot of problems. Early on after building the first iteration of the site, I discovered that my site didn’t work very well in any version of Internet Explorer. To fix the design in IE took me a very long time of researching into browser issues with percentage designs, but I did eventually fix the problems by providing an alternate style sheet for my iTunes store. Obviously this isn’t the ideal situation, but it became apparent that this was the only solution that I could work with to make sure the site worked correctly.
Although I did invest a lot of time in making the design work across all browsers, I don’t regret choosing to do a liquid design because it has provided me with a lot more knowledge of percentages layouts and how to build them. Building a percentage layout might have been extremely challenging at times, but it exactly the kind of challenge I needed to keep my development skills fresh.
One area that I think I lacked this assignment was the development process. I did a development process for both the new logo I was going to use and the design, but because I had been thinking about the design whilst writing my reports at the beginning of the assignment, I already had quite a good idea as to what design I was going to go for. Usually I would see this as a negative, but I believe this was one of those times when your best idea comes to you first. I did explore other ideas, but as soon as I had got this idea down on paper I knew it was the one.
I think I could have been a bit more objective during the development process to combat this issue of settling on one idea early on, and this is something that I will take on for my final assignment. Admittedly this is never an issue I have come across before, but now it has arisen I must create an action plan to put this right if this happens again. In future, I will try to be more objective at the development stage, and try not to go in with any pre-conceived ideas. If I do come up with a good idea early on, I must remember that it is important to still explore a range of other ideas.
Collecting feedback is another area that I feel I could have improved upon in this assignment, by collecting feedback on more stages than just near the end. For this assignment I only asked people’s opinions at one stage – after finished screen designs – so I could have asked at an earlier stage. It is a difficult balance to achieve as if you ask for feedback too early people can’t see enough of your idea to understand it, but if you ask too late your design is likely to be too far down the road to completion to act on it. In future assignments I believe I will ask for feedback during the initial roughs stage just to get a general feeling for what kind of things that people think might work, then ask after digitised screen designs, and then once more after the site has been made into a website.
I also believe I haven’t done as much evaluative work in this assignment as I would have liked to, and I think this could have been because of all the evaluative work I was doing for the self-managed learning plan during this assignment. For the final assignment I plan on doing a weekly project evaluation so I can see how the assignment is panning out. In future too, I will evaluate my professional progress on a monthly basis.
Overall, the assignment has gone smoothly and I haven’t experienced many problems that have caused me great difficulty. Even though we were technically just creating a website again, this process has felt a lot different to previous assignments, and I have enjoyed it. I feel I have learned a few valuable skills with my decision to try a percentage-based design, and I have some solid improvements that I can make for any future assignments, and ultimately my professional career.
Areas to improve upon:
- Collect more evidence of feedback at more stages of the development process
- Write regular evaluations of how the assignment is progressing
- Try to be more objective during the development process, and try not to focus on one idea too much
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