As the project comes to an end, there was still much for us to do in order to complete our campaign. I had two people review the website in its current state, which gave me this information:
Q1. What’s your first impression of the website?
Software Developer: The website is good and logically laid out
Average Internet User: The website is clean and professional
Q2. Is the website easy to navigate?
Software Developer: Yes, the website is concise
Average Internet User: Somewhat, the portfolio posts were hard to find
Q3. Is the website aesthetically pleasing?
Software Developer: Yes, the website looks reasonably professional and suits the purpose for which it’s been created
Average Internet User: Yes, the website is simple (see Q1 response)
Q4. If you could change something about the website, what would it be?
Software Developer: The Nescot logo could be rendered better, and lessen the amount of blank space/white space (add more sections of colour to break up the blankness)
Average Internet User: Size down the pixelated logo or find another alternative, consider moving the portfolio/posts into another sections (or moving them to be in the ‘work’ section, and renaming work to ‘Portfolio’)
This gave us a little more to go on, and also gave me the chance to finally work on the website. This was something I'd yet to do due to miscommunication, so I spent some time going through the mobile version of the website, since this hadn't yet been edited and was in a messy state. It was mainly like this due to how Wix converts web-pages to mobile, which is always a little janky and messy.
Whilst doing this, I released a second portfolio post on the website. I plan to continue doing this throughout the holidays until all my drafted posts have been released.
Since the website had to be published today, I decided to get some final feedback on it. Unfortunately I was limited on the amount of people who could review the website, so the responses that I filled in on the document were shorter:
Q1. Does the website work correctly?
Average Internet Users: Yes, everything goes where it needs to go.
Q2. Is the website aesthetically pleasing?
Average Internet Users: Yes, the pictures and small amount of text make it easy to understand, as well and simple. It’s cleanly presented and nice to look at.
Q4. Is this a good promotional website?
Average Internet Users: Yes, it concisely conveys what it needs to.
This feedback is exactly what we want at the end of a project, since this means that the website is successful and that Cade and Chase have done a good job on the website. I went back and made some final changes to the website, such as adding in links to my blogs, and changing one of the images out for a new one, which was of a better quality. From here, the website has been finished and the portfolio work can be posted gradually.
It would have been better to get feedback from those who would be interested in this course, such as the students of NextGen, but unfortunately we just ran out of time to get in contact with anyone to organise this. Due to Covid, I was also limited in the people I could ask to review the website as well. If I were to do this project again, I would establish a target audience to continually have reviwing changes to the website, which give feedback more accurate to who will be viewing the website.
This brings me to the end of this project. This project has been an experience that has shown me how teamwork can go wrong. For example, any group discussions we had worked well with getting everyone on the same page, but everyone was taking something different away from the discussions, essentially pushing us further away as a group.
I mentioned in the previous post that each of us took on a different task in this project, which didn't restrict me from helping them with their tasks, but this was never communicated to me in conversation. If I were to do this project again, I would set more rigid roles for everyone, as well as communicate with everyone frequently about what they're doing and what they plan to do next.
If I could restart this project, the roles I would give everyone for creating a campaign based on our course would be to have Chase drafting the website, Cade communicating with people about what to include on our website, and myself drafting up and listing all of the subjects and media to include in the posts. This is what was originally the case, but unfortunately things became messy and Cade and Chase combined their roles without properly communicating this (as I only found out a week after they first started both working on the website).
Another thing that definitely affected our project was splitting the work between college and home. This meant that the only real time we communicated about this project physically was once a week at college. While we communicated fairly well in college, when long-distance we barely communicated at all, and it was hard to get a message out quickly due to all of us having different schedules. This meant that we worked slower when long-distance, and faster when at college. Although being at college also meant working with Macs, which sometimes made working dificult, as they are vastly different from PCs. This was a big problem for me, as it meant I had to organise all the media for my blog posts at home on a PC, since OneDrive doesn't work the best on Macs.
The benefits of being at college were being able to communicate easily with the group and also with David, the tutor overseeing the project. This meant that we could ask any questions we had, and then be able to discuss it. If we had attempted to do this long distance, then it would have been in email or text form, and would've had a delay. Receiving emails also makes it harder to truly convey any question or thoughts like you can in person, which can limit your understanding on something you were trying to clarify.
Whilst we were first turning our attention to creating a website campaign for our course, opening evenings at Nescot were happening. The next open evenings will be in March 2022, which means the website will be filled with posts by that time, and will hopefully spur people on to join the course who see it.
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