Tuesday 11 September 2007

Start of the first assignment

On Monday I started a new assignment, there was a lot to take in as there was loads of information, I fairly understand what I have to do but I am still a bit nervous of what is expected, as I am not sure if the work I will do will be good enough.

First thing I did after I had been told what the assignment was was research the person I have chosen to design a web site on. The person I have chosen is Guy Fawkes, I chose Guy Fawkes because I remember doing about him in Primary school, but had to use books and I can remember how boring it was reading and copying from books, so I got an idea to design an interesting and easy to use web site.

When I researched Guy Fawkes there was quiet a few web site about him and there loads of pages of information about him for schools, but the pages had hardly any information on them and no pictures on some there which made them not very interesting for children. I found two web sites that I am going to compare for a competitive analysis task which I am going to do next week, one web site could do with some improvement and the other web site is good and there is only a few things I don't like, but I can take the good ideas from both the web site and use them in my design and I can use the bad idea and changes them in good ideas if I want to use them.

Today I created a weekly plan and production schedule it took me half hour to do. For the production schedule I sorted out what tasks need to be done and estimated how long it was going to take me to do the tasks, which was quite difficult because I don't know yet how long a task is going to take. So over 4 weeks I have about 3 tasks a week to do but I am not sure if that will stay as planned, has I might need extra time or I might finish a task quicker that I expected. For the weekly time sheet I just write when I start a task, how long I estimate it's going to take me and how long it actually took me. I find using time management useful and helps me get less stress when it get close to the hand in date, because if I use the schedule right I should complete the assignment a week before it’s due in.

So today have done two tasks and started on a third task. I have set goals for the web site I am designing this task told longer than I thought and I had to have a good think about what I wanted the goals to be. The second task I have done is set a target audience which is primary school children. I enjoyed doing the research work to find a suitably target audience, its good to see what other web site are like so I can compare my design to their web site to see what they have better so I could improve my design.

Using a sketchbook to keep notes and idea is useful and when I do find inspiration I can just stick it in the sketchbook and go back to it when I need inspiration, which is good because I won't find inspiration just sat looking at a computer. I am going to keep stick good inspiration in my sketchbook so I always have some fresh ideas to look at.

Today my small group I have been put into had seminar meeting. I didn't know what to expect at the meeting but now I think the meeting are going to be useful for when I have any question about what I need to do on a task , how could I improve my work or if I have any problems I can discuses them at the meeting.

2 comments:

Craig Burgess said...

Victoria, I had the EXACT same problem with planning when I first started.

It is difficult to plan and estimate how long it will take you when you've either not done the task before or not very often. It will come to you though after a bit of practice.

Just make sure you're keeping track of how long you predicted it would take you, and EXACTLY how long it did take.

Craig Allington said...

Agree with what Craig has said already.

It's good that you've set up a production schedule and got your time plans sorted already though, even if your not sure how long tasks will take it will be a great learning tool.