Sprint 10
This week, I continued making various final adjustments to my site. I worked on optimizing responsiveness further, allowing the site to look big enough on a larger screen, as well as optimizing the mobile view. In addition, I made minor adjustments to borders/shadows and fixed the site calendar, which wasn’t embedding the way I wanted it to last week. I also added a favicon (little icon in the browser window next to the page title). As for hosting, I decided not to worry about that at this point because it would take a long time to find a reliable hosting service and make sure that the hosting works correctly, and I would rather spend the rest of my time working on the actual website and making it look as nice as possible. I can present it off of a local directory during the showcase, so hosting won’t be required for that, and I can submit it as a class assignment through screenshots or screen capture so I don’t have to worry about hosting for that aspect of the project either. After this semester, I will have more time to find a good hosting service and put the site up for the band to actually be able to use it. They’re not in a hurry, so I should be good.
Something I learned this week about my project was how to optimize various online calendars to look properly when embedded. I had to go through several different web services to find the one that would allow me to use the exact settings I needed, but I finally settled on a service called “Time.ly”. I also continued learning about responsiveness, which I’ve really been learning every week throughout this process. Responsiveness is very important these days because many folks access the internet on their phones more than on their computers, so adding proper breakpoints and using responsive layouts is crucial. I’m glad that this project has allowed me to practice this skill, because I only really knew about it in theory before, and now I have some real life experience. I also learned more about shadows and borders.
Something I learned about my process was to not be afraid/hesitant to go back and edit things that I thought have already been completed, such as the embedding of my calendar or the formatting of the band members’ bios. Sometimes when you’ve already completed something, you’re afraid to go back to it because even though there may be minor edits you need to make, you may be worried that you’ll ruin what you already have created by messing with the code. The key here is to “comment out” the code that you have that works decently so that it remains within your project but doesn’t show up on the page, and then copy and paste it right above and work on adjusting that. If your adjustments end up doing more harm than good, you can always delete the copied version and reincorporate the old code that you have commented out.
Something I learned about the design process in general is that sometimes your design will guide you versus you guiding your design. What this means is that sometimes you will create things that influence you to make decisions you hadn’t expected when first starting the process or may push you to add certain features and adjustments that you couldn’t have possibly predicted would be needed before you took certain particular design steps. This is actually a very good thing, in my opinion, because it sort of allows the project to design itself as time goes on and allows you to not have to come up with every single detail of the design ahead of time, which can be a struggle.
