Evaluation - Website

To be honest I am a disappointed with the way my website has turned out it just doesn't look like I thought or hoped it would. One of the main issues I think I have made for myself is spending more time planning and designing the home page than any other, and I think when people look at the site they will know and realise as it is so obvious more effort and designing went into it than another page. I think that if I had planned out the other pages and the ways I wanted to present the information on these pages I would have saved myself a lot of problems when designing and also got each page to a design level where I was happy with it. 

That being said I am happy with what I have learnt and can take away form this project as this was my first time hand coding a  website fully I learnt a lot on this side of the project. Coding both HTML and CSS which I really enjoyed and think will be very useful for the future, I also learnt about responsive website what makes them, how they work etc. which again will be very useful for the future. Planning and designing for a full website was also slightly different to when I last did it in a previous project. Also as mentioned above I have learnt that you need to plan all of your pages for a website and not just one otherwise it just becomes weaker and weaker as you add more pages. 

I also don't think that making as many changes as I did on the final day helped either as the changes were rushed so it could be submitted for the deadline. These changes were completely remaking the geology and wildlife page to lose the tab system and the image slider. Which I think these pages now look better but with more time could of become something I was really happy with. Whilst I know these changes needed to be made and make my website stronger I think I should have considered them and made them earlier so the pages would look a lot better now. 

Overall I am happy with my ideas for this project and what I have learnt form it such as coding, making it responsive, user testing, validating and jquery etc. However I feel that I could have made the website look a lot better in terms of layouts and structures and basically just a stronger final product. But i think making this mistake now in this project will make my next website or web based project a lot stronger. 

Validating my Website

I validated the code of my website using http://validator.w3.org/check, I put each of the html pages through the check and got a page like this one for each of the checks.  It gave me a number of error and warnings and also detailed this further down the page like this.

I then went through trying to fix the error in there code this was not difficult as the validator gave me a description of the error as well as the line number for where it was in the code. It took time to validate each of the pages and fix the errors, but at the same time it sorted out parts of the code and helped me find little errors that I otherwise wouldn't of. 

After making the changes to the code for example adding a missing close tag I revalidated each of the pages and eventually they came up green with no errors found. 

CSS - 

I also validated my CSS3 using http://csslint.net after pasting in and checking my whole CSS my results ok as seen here. 

The main issue was the 3 errors in the code so I wanted to make sure these were fixed. After going through the code and fixing the problems i rechecked the CSS and got 0 errors the warning were still there but this was mainly all around the order and the way I had written the CSS and as this was my first time hand coding the CSS completely I can take these warning forward to my next website. 

User Testing on my website

To test my website I out I did some small user testing asking 5 people 5 questions about the site, to see if they could navigate around, find information or links and also find it easy to use. 

The questions I asked were - 

• Can you find the rock types gallery ?
• Can you find the Red tailed hawk in the wildlife page? 
• Can you navigate to the wildlife page without using the standard navigation?
• Can you find the information on Erosion?
• How quickly can you navigate to the bottom of the history pages info?

I picked these questions as they tested out the pages and features of the site I wasn't sure about as well as seeing if my navigation worked and people could get round the site easily. 

The results were pretty good people could find out the information and navigate to it well and without getting lost so the basic structure of my website was working. The main issues I had was the tab feature as it did not load automatically as you click on the page this confused some people whilst answering question 1. Also the scroll boxes I had on the website did not work as well as I hoped and people found these annoying to use. 

Overall using testing was successful and gave me things to improve on before the deadline. 

Updated Production Schedule.

As I said earlier in the blog I would update my production schedule nearer the end of the project So here is a screenshot of how that turned out. I marked out what I hoped to achieve at different stages such as "finish the homepage". Overall I think I managed to keep on trakc and almost up to date with my schedule. 

The schedule was useful but with the problems that appear whilst coding and making a website it was difficult to keep up. 

Evaluation - iBook

I enjoyed making the ibook in this project it was the first time I had used the software or even heard of it. So at first it was tricky to get used too as some of the features were different to what I was used too. However it was easy to learn and once I understood what I was doing I found it easy to start designing my ibook. To start with I worked on the background images for the book thinking about what ones would work how to split them up and also how to keep them themed to the content the were behind. What I tried to do was use rocks for the background of the geology chapter, vintage canyon imagery for the back of the history chapter and animals for the back of the wildlife chapter. This way the images relate to the topic they are the background too. In the end I thought this worked well and the images work well with each other in the different chapter and provide nice backdrops to the content. 

Next on I looked at the different option I had to get some interactivity into the ibook looking at the widgets both in ibook author and the website Bookry. This gave me a range of the widgets to use throughout the book, I wanted to try and make it as interesting and interactive as possible. Overall I am happy with the widgets I have included I think there is a good range from pop-overs to image galleries, to interactive mazes. This hopefully will keep the book interesting for the users and give them the information in a unique way. 

Overall I am happy with my final product for the iBook I think it has a lot of content for the users to read and explore but keeps it interesting and interactive through the widgets and imagery. Now the layout are cleaner as well I am pleased with how it all turned out, I found the software good and easy to use in the end. 

Asset Register

One of the aims for this project was to have an asset register I had not created one of these for a project before so it was a interesting learning experience. The idea is to record all of the text and graphic content that goes into your website. To do this I created a number document and had three columns. 

• Asset 
• Source
• Use

The asset column is where I put a picture of each of the assets whether it was and image I made or sourced and even website where I got my content from. The source column is the URL of each of the images videos or website that I got the assets from, N/A was for the content that I made as I was the source. Finally the use column is where I explained where and what the use of the assets was, for example "Eagle in the bird gallery."

Overall I thin I have recored almost all of the text and graphics used in the website and the ibook with a source and a use. So I am happy with how the asset register turned out. 

Images and Graphics for the iBook

For some of the ibook widgets I decided to created cover for them whether they were videos or games. I went with the same theme throughout with a image in the background and the main colour form my colour scheme. Combined them together so the colour was a overlay with a reduced opacity, this way it looked similar to the website and kept the theme consistent. As well as this I think they are nice visual queues for the user in the ibook and fit in well rather than just having a youtube icon for example.