Week 005

We made a decent amount of progress this week. Amy and Ivona have been putting together some great Competitive Analysis, Barbara's been taking a lot of good notes on site content structure, and I spent a lot of time on our Gantt Chart, Budget, Timeline, and Internal Calendar.

I'm still a little numb to the project though. Right now I'm feeling like it's just another website repeat. I've gotten kind of burned out of websites, but hopefully we can learn some interesting things to apply to the HACER website through our research. I really do want to make it a good project.

Class now. Here we go!

Week 004

Quite overwhelmed with all my work, but I've managed to pull through with the proposal and getting the WBS, draft timeline, and budget done. Ended up slacking off on Human Factors and Reading for Ideas in order to get those two accomplished for the week.

Barbara and Amy switched roles, which I am quite happy with. The more I started working with the two of them on the proposal, I began to feel like Barbara would be a great Content Editor and Amy would be great at Information Architecture since she is more artistic her Design skills will be really useful.

Hopefully next week will be less stressful. I feel like I got a lot of work done ahead of time with doing a lot of work on the timeline and budget. However, we do have the Gantt chart due in Project Management which will take a while.

The one thing I am a little worried about is that Kristoffer picked on our group hardcore during our proposal critique without making much mention of the Sparke group's sketchy wording, grammar, and design. I feel like he pushed us away from what we were doing, but gave us very little idea of what would be better. It was really a critique of "This is good and this is bad" without any "what would be better."

Luckily, Ivan was there as usual to clarify things for us and get us rolling in a good direction. I have heard from anonymous sources that Kristoffer tends to pick one group and give them considerably more criticism and attention than other groups over the course of the semester. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing I am not sure. I like the attention, but I don't appreciate the harsh criticism without suggestion of what would be better. I understand that Kristoffer wants to be somewhat vague so as to leave the creativity up to the group, but I feel that it is better to generate options and let us run with them than do nothing and leave the group frustrated and confused.

Well, I'm out of time. Hope that covers enough. I'm confident in the project. i will succeed.

Week 003 - Scope. It keeps your mouth clean?

So, week three has passed. I was a bit stressed out (and still am) about the scope of our project and what our final goal will actually be. I Emailed Alyssa about talking on the phone on Friday about it to sort things out, but unfortunately because of MCAD's tightened email security, the email that she sent to me at 10:00AM didn't get to me until 6:00PM. In that email, she had told me that she would be able to talk with my on Friday at 1:00PM, but since the email didn't come til later, that unfortunately was a lost cause. We are planning to talk tomorrow at 1:00PM, so hopefully things will get worked out then, and I can put the finishing touches on our proposal and timeline.

Other than that, things are going well. Our team has Barbara working on taking in the whole site map and looking for bugs and Ivona is looking at visual design and starting our competitive research. Amy and I had a meeting today to put together the best of our four proposals into one master proposal, which I will be completing tomorrow. Good stuff. Now lets design a website! Not code one...

Week 002

So, week #Deux!

We got to meet our client from HACER. Rodolpho and Alyssa were both super nice and pleasantly prepared! They've obviously dealt with website people before and I was pleasantly surprised by receiving a wonderful bible of all thing HACER Website to help in our endeavor. Not only were they prepared, but they were realistic and understanding of us just being students with only 15 weeks on the project. However, students and 15 weeks aside, we're gonna make a kick ass website. I know it. Ivan Nunez, our team coach, is also a great guy. He seems super knowledgeable and asked some really insightful questions for us at our meeting. Lots of information to digest and a draft proposal due next class. I'm started and prepared.

So, here's to the next 13 weeks of my life in Vis Studio. Let then be productive. I am determined to create one serious website. Clean, sharp, and communicatively direct. GO!