The Process
Our capstone team originally consisted of 4 members, Mick, Kristy, Melissa and myself. We were presented with a handful of potential clients and as a team were to pick two that we felt stong about and wanted to design for. We chose Petite Boutique and YrdSale4U. We felt that both of these clients would offer us a challenge and be a great opportunity to get some exposure. After picking our clients we then split into groups of two. Melissa and I came up with the proposal for YrdSale4U, and Kristy and Mick came up with the proposal for Petite Boutique. We then brought our proposals to class and as a team came up with two solid proposals and presented them to each of our clients. Once the proposals were agreed upon and signed off on we were able to get started working on both of our projects. Here is how the process went for both web sites:
Petite Boutique
Brief Description of client:
Lori Roe, co-owner of Petite Boutique a small local business located in Brentwood Tenessee, plans to redesign her current website. The site redesign will include a standard template for the current content pages and Wordpress, a content management system, that will be utilized in the design to simplify routine site updates.
For this project, Kristy, Melissa and myself, all submitted mock-up designs for Lori to chose from. Mick felt a little out of his element with this being a women's clothing store, so he chose to focus all of his time on the YrdSale4U design. I spent alot of time designing the mockup for this site. This stage of the project ended up being my favorite part of this project. I used Photoshop and Ilustrator to create my mockup. I used alot of the skills that I leared about design from Digital Imaging 1 and Illustrator. For this design, I chose to use the same color scheme as one of Lori's past seasonal flyers, which was pink and green. I used some of the same elements that were used in the flyer because it seemed like this was the type of design she liked. I wanted to stick to a similar theme for her new website in order to create a sense of familiarity. Lori ended up liking different design aspects from my design and Kristy's design. Together, Kristy and I came up with a final design using elements from each mock-up that Lori wanted in her site. Kristy was elected the team captain on this project and was responsible for all communication between our team and our client. She also elected to be responsible for integrating our site design into Wordpress. Kristy also designed the HTML template for this site. Mick was in charge of creating the CSS for the site. I chose too be in charge of file optimization and creating the HTML for the inner pages. I felt comfortable with my knowledge in both areas and felt confident in knowing that I would be able to complete each task without many problems.
YrdSale4U
Brief Description of client:
Lynn Shelton is in need of a website to expand her new business, better reach her target audience, as well as to serve loyalists in an effective, easy-to-navigate manner. The site's main objective will be to provide information about YardSale4U and to update loyalists about upcoming events and featured items.
For our second project all four team members came up with different mock-ups to present to Lynn. Lynn wasn't really sure what she wanted and needed in her website which became a challenge for all of us when designing our mock-ups. I ended up using mainly Photoshop for this mock-up design. I had a harder time coming up with a design for this project because Lynn didn't have any content to offer us except her logo at this time in the project. Her logo was black, lime green and red, which I tried to incorporate into the rest of my design. This was a struggle because I didn't really know what to include in the mockup design. I didn't feel as confident in this design as I did with Petite Boutique. This process helped me to discover that it is alot easier for me to design when I have more content to work with than starting a design from scratch. Lynn liked the overall look of Melissa's design so she was chosen to be our team representative was in charge of coming up with the final mock-up . This process ended up taking way too long and greatly effected our original timeline. Melissa ended up dropping out of the Capstone class which was a devastating loss for our team. We were already behind on this project because of the delay in the final mockup and losing our team captain just made everything more stressful and complicated than it already was. After this roadblock, the rest of our team regrouped and figured out what needed to be done in order to still meet our deadline. With Melissa off the team, Kristy submitted one last mock-up which Lynn loved and became our design for the website. With most of Kristy's time being involved in trying to learn and implement Wordpress for our other site, Mick and I decided to take on the bulk of the work for this site. At this time in the project, we still weren't able to obtain much content from Lynn so we were forced to use placeholder photos and dummy text. Kristy designed the CSS for the site template which left the rest of the coding up to Mick and I. I used what knowledge I gained from Begining HTML and Sitebuilding 1 in order to complete this task. Kristy and Mick seemed to be alot more familiar with CSS than I was so I had to do some reading and research on my own. I already knew that I was a stronger designer than a coder and this project made it really aparent. I know what I need to improve on and that I need to work alot harder at it in order to be where I would like to be.
