75 Word Entry - that's tiny!

Trying to sum up who you are as a designer in just 75 words is a big challenge. You want it make the reader like you and respect your ideals. To help me come up with my 75 words, I have decided to see how other companies or web designers sum up their abilities and disciplines in the About Us sections of their websites:

http://www.absolute-design.co.uk/about-us/ 
Absolute design seem to think about web design the same way that I do.

Colour and imagery are best used to portray an identity through the use of the web. A website is an extension of a company or person and should be seen to best show the ideals and purpose throughout its pages. 

Perhaps this will suite for my catalogue entry as it describes my thoughts on what is web design?

SPP five images

Exhibition Package

I am currently working on making 5 images which will represent my work as part of my SPP exhibition package. Putting together images of your work to represent yourself is quite a challenge I think because you have to get it right in order to make the right impression.

What is normal for web designers to do to promote their work in images? Do they simply take a screen shot of a website they have made and have done with it? Or do they try to be a little bit more creative?

After having a look to see how designers have displayed their work online, many did simply have screen shot images of the websites they have made, I decided to adopt a style that I have seen a few designers use:

 sjlwebdesign.co.uk

Some designers have 'stacked' images of the same website together to better display a piece of work in its entirety.

Another popular way of displaying a web page is to put the screen shot at an angle and take a cropped section of that image:

sjlwebdesign.co.uk

Thinking about my 5 images, I want to see what will work best to represent myself. My first choice is to take the 'stacked' image approach with a gray to white gradient in the background. But do I need to keep a consistent design with my own personal branding? 

My current website www.skirky.co.uk has a wooden effect background, if I am to keep my own branding consistent then I think I can do this simply by adding this look to the images which I will submit:

It is a tough choice because even though I feel the gray background looks more professional, the wooden background has a more 'homemade' style which what I love and it retains my brand.

If my images which are to feature in the exhibition catalogue and in the exhibition keep the same style as my personal website, if someone does decide to find out more about me, it will be clear that this work is connected to me.

Content and Going All Romanian

This week I have been starting to put in content that my client has started to feed through to me. I have the welcome page text, the 'about us' content as well as a few other bits and bobs.

I am just starting to insert their products into the database to replace the test images and information that I have been using, its all slowly taking shape.

Another thing I have been working on is the Romanian half of the website, this has started to come together now that I have the text content to use on the pages. I managed to adapt my MSQL table so that it defines 'romanian' and 'english' so that the right pages can pull the right information (in terms of language required). This will all come together now that I am going to insert the actual products to the database.

Also, I found out today that the CMS (back end) can stay in English which is quite convenient, this is because the person that will most probably be making any changes on the website is sufficient with English. I have told my client that if they do want it changed to Romanian, it will not be a problem.

Product of the Day

Getting the product of the day to display in the index page has been a big coding challenge for me. The aim was to get a different random product each day from the 'Product' database, this would be the 'Product of the Day'. I managed to get the random code working so that a random product was selected from my database but it kept changing on page load instead of the same product displaying throughout the day.

I was unable to solve this problem so I have had to compromise and delegate a product to each day of the week. This works just fine and still means that the product of the day is automatically selected, which is what my client requested, it also means that the products can easily be changed if my client wanted to.
This is the PHP code for the Product of the day:
It took a while to sort out the displaying of the product of the day, I am just trying to sort out the positioning of the rosette:

Contact Page for Client Project

 After playing around with several different php contact form codes, I finally realised that it was my wamp server that was not allowing the email to send, not the code. So now I have a simple contact page which a person can fill in and the email will send to my client's inbox.

Many Thanks to freecontactform.com for the easy to follow code.

So now my contacts page looks like this:

Contact Page and Action Plan

I am now working on the contact page for my client's website, I have followed tutorial to do this because I have never made one before, for some reason though this is not working yet. I will keep at it and try to get it working in the next couple of days.

With regards to the overall progress of my Client website, I would say that I was about 60% done which means I have lots to do before my deadline in 5 weeks.

I need to:

• Finish the contact page (get it working)
• Look at integrating some Flash interactive elements to the photo banners on the About Us and Location Page. This will have to include 'if' statements for relevant browser or flash software used. So if the user does not have the right software to view this it will display as a static image.
• Create the PHP for the 'Product of the day' which will appear on the index page and the menu page. I have tried to find some tutorials for this and so far have not had much luck, I need to do this soon.
• Content Content Content; I will need to again ask for the content from my client so that I can start to replace the lorem ipsum and finalise composition of the text and image elements throughout the site.
• I need to create the Romanian half of the site, there will be an option to switch between English and Romanian. One of the ways to do this will be to add another table into my database which will be the products in Romanian to pull from for the Romanian menu pages.

So, lots and lots to do still....best get to it!

Artefact 4 Evaluation

Evaluation of the One Page Templates

I tried to build a picture as to what the future of online portfolios and online presences might be. My understanding is that employers want to see all the various online presences a person has in order to get a full picture of how the person works and how competent they are at what they do. Therefore I think a future trend might me that practitioners create a one page portfolio website, like a profile, that brings in elements from whatever online presences they feel is necessary. To demonstrate my idea I created two examples of these one page portfolios into which I included examples of my work, a feed from my blog and a feed from my Twitter account. I then held two focus groups with my peers to get their thoughts on my idea of the future of portfolio websites.

Both groups agreed that this was a really good idea because the websites were both simplistic and they liked how everything was pulled into one place which they saw as being much better for the employer who can easily see their work or blog posts and quickly get a good sense of the person they are and the skills they have.

They discussed how the style and functions of a portfolio website (which I described as being like a profile page portfolio website) would benefit them as practitioners because people can view all of their information easily. This style of portfolio allows the designer to include whichever information they see fit, Filmmakers also discussed how they find it important to include who they have worked with in the past to better depict their work experience. They said that this dynamic style of portfolio will easily enable them to do that.

Artifact 4 cont

I have now made a second website as part of my 4th artifact which has a different layout, this layout came from seeing this one page portfolio website (which I think is really good) - www.kinoz.com.


Second Website: www.skirky.co.uk/portfolio2

Now that I have made the two portfolio websites, I will get feedback on the effectiveness of the sites. This will either be done via a questionnaire or a focus group. I think a focus group will the better way to get people's opinions on the websites.

Artifact 4

Have finished to first website to be used as an artifact:

Portfolio 1 

I am now working on the second, it will have the same information in it but will have a different layout.