Reflection

Thoughts
My overall thoughts about the project are positive. I enjoyed the realistic context and approach. In contrast to others, I thought pushing us to develop a mock-up of the Wix site and then switching gears to a Dreamweaver site was incredibly realistic. I do agree that there was a lot of confusion because of this (with deadlines and other such things). How many times are we going to face similar pressures and frustrations in our jobs? Also, I feel the experience was more about the process and challenge, rather than the final project. I did learn to use some new tools (HotPotatoes) but other than that, I relied on my previous knowledge for most of the deliverables. Perhaps providing some relevant tutorials or knowledge before beginning the group projects would be helpful?

Teamwork was an important part of this project. Kevin was wonderful in coming up with the content for both the What If... page as well as the Save the Earth page. Kevin also came up with the assessments. To put it simply, Kevin was the brains of the operation and I suppose I was the brawn! I simply tried to use my knowledge of Dreamweaver and Graphic Design skills to put together a functional and appealing website. Thanks Kevin for critiquing my wording!

I feel slightly disappointed in all of the navigation problems with the site. I put a lot of work into trying to make all of the links work and the overall functionality of the project. I should have been more attentive to the Spry issues and went with some other option. I tend to obsess over these kinds of things, but I suppose I should take this knowledge and apply it to my individual project and move on.

As far as adjustments to the site goes, I would rely heavily on the comments we received from others over our project. I have pulled a few of the pertinent comments out to address.

Adjustments

Navigation

"I think your next image is a great idea (touch the hand with your hand), but it feels strange to be moving my cursor to the left to go next. Perhaps you might place it at the end of the sentence?"

This first comment is a quick fix. Originally I had placed the hand image on right alignment, but I felt that it was at odds with the sidebar being on the left. I'm mainly a graphic design person, so I was sacrificing common sense for alignment and flow of the page I suppose. =)

"Is it just me or is there an issue with the navigation bar across the top? It looks good, but it doesn't seem to work for me. I'm using Chrome."
"My only critique would be that the navigation was a little confusing for me. I expected the words in the top banner to be actual links. I can understand why you chose to keep the course linear but I guess I always prefer to jump around to topics that interest me most. Actually, that brings up a question. Is it necessary to have a linear course in order to implement the First Principles correctly?"

The main feedback we had was confusion over navigation. When I originally altered the template, I wanted a navigation bar with a drop-down for the Basic Concepts. I felt it was important to have them together, but on separate pages. When I went to the Dreamweaver Help menu, it pointed me to the Spry Navigation Bar but cautioned that there were many issues with navigation because the HTML (XML) was not supported by all formats. I went ahead and made the navigation with Spry but added the bottom navigation to offset any problems with moving through the site. I take sole responsibility on this decision, since Kevin left the design mostly up to me. I apologize for any issues this caused!


Assessment

"Your assessment takes an interesting approach, and I like the in-depth questions, but it is unclear to me how this would function. How will you provide feedback to your users?How do they know if their answer is good? Are you reviewing them? If so, how will you get responses back to the user since you don't have their contact info? Also, the scrolling makes it difficult to work with"

I think this comment is regarding the Google document that is embedded on the Lend a Hand page. We went with this format because we had continuous issues with HotPotatoes and wanted a quick fix. I could easily add sections for contact information to be sent along with the individuals answers. However, I assumed that since this was a course for a virtual High School, that some log-in information would be required from each individual before they accessed the course. I should have clarified this beforehand. The document can be embedded without any scroll bars, but it sent the template into whack, so I down-sized it. If I were to continue working on this project, I would fix the sizing on the box as well as the template being off-center on high resolution screens.

~Mikah

References
Sustainable Development