During the capstone project experience I was still learning a lot. The difference this time is I was learning through real-world experience. Working with a real client opened my eyes to how to communicate properly with clients. I also learned more about completing a project with deadlines.
Our team organized itself with Annabella as our project manager. Philip and I switched between designing for the site and managing the content. Phillip was responsible for ensuring that page content was consistent across the entire site. I was responsible for designing the color theme, implementing the social icon links and finishing the footer. Annabella as project manager communicated with our client and kept us on track with our work.
The beginning of the project was very different from the end. In the beginning we didn’t have a clear direction of what our site needed. We knew how many pages we would need but we didn’t have a good idea of where to go design wise. I think we would’ve had a better idea of where to go if we had asked our clients different questions in our initial meeting. One question we didn’t ask was “Do you have any websites you like?”. This question would’ve been helpful in narrowing down the design of our website. Since we didn’t have the clearest direction of where to go, we just picked a theme and started working with it. We started by migrating the old content to the new site and worked on revising it. I wasn’t really satisfied with the direction of the website. This is one thing I would do differently if I did it again. I would try to get a better initial idea for the website.
After our halfway meeting with our client, we had a much clearer direction of how the site should look. They asked for two items that made us reconsider our theme choice. The first was a homepage that had a gallery of rotating images the second was a floating donate button. They also wanted us to have a much higher contrast color theme. After considering all of these problems our team decided to change the current theme. We changed the theme to one that fit our clients' needs.
It was like we were working from scratch, but I was more satisfied with the direction we were going. I was proud of how our team responded to the sudden change. We took it in stride and kept pushing. At this point our clients also started helping out a lot with providing content for the website. Previously they had provided pictures but let us change up the text content. Now they were sending us exactly what we needed for the text content.
I was happy with the look of the final website. I think we made several improvements on the old design. We improved the design and layout of the site. We improved the functionality of the site and the navigation.