project obstacles & solutions
During the creation process the NSCC web team encountered many obstacles. All projects have bumps and our team was the first class to participate in the Capstone course.
The weekly progress reports give a detailed description of problems, solutions, and timelines.
Below is a summary of problems the NSCC web team encounterd, the solutions that were implemented, and changes to the project design if any occurred.
Obstacles Encountered
- Time concerns with EnVigur’s website.
- After accessing godaddy.com I found that Le Pooch and Co. had an insufficient hosting account for our site. We also encountered problems with accessing the account and with free advertising banners. I encountered similar problems with EnVigur's parked page.
- Encountered problems setting up forms and form mail.
- Found that in general, Go Daddy’s web hosting services site was difficult to navigate. Although it is possible, the fumbling generally slows down the process.
- Some team members encountered problems with customer service representatives that were incompetent at their jobs.
- We also came across problems forwarding the domain to our work in progress page.
- When the team created and approved the business proposals it seemed we delegated jobs appropriately according to importance and job categories (i.e. planning, design, implementation). However, now that we are in creation process, I don’t think we fully considered how many hours of work were actually being delegated.
- Found that multiple communication channels can be confusing when three or more systems are being implemented.
- Changes requested by the clients to the design and navigation of the website have created a need for later deadlines.
- Problems meeting the clients' needs while still being web viewer friendly.
NSCC web team's solutions
- Denise Foxworth quickly allowed us to upgrade Le Pooch and Co.'s hosting account. After permission was received to upgrade, I created a new hosting account and posted the login information to the discussion board.
- After research, I found the form code instructions GoDaddy supplied were wrong. GoDaddy said to place a link to the gdform.cgi file in the form, however when you download the files from godaddy you receive a file named gdform.php. After reinstalling the scripts twice, I decided to go ahead and replace the code; this solved the problem.
- I worked around the domain forwarding problem by saving index.html as index2.html temporarily, thus allowing me to resave tempindex.html as index.html. This was a quicker fix then trying to work with the customer service representatives.
- The NSCC web team discovered and fixed the communication errors that were holding back the projects around week 9.
- Josh & Krystal really came together and got a hold of the Envigur project. I was able to set up good communications with the client Denise Foxworth and started making the large changes that were being requested and the class allowed me to make the changes without having to go through a group approval process. This really increased the projects speed.
- Once open communications were created, I was able to explain web accessibility problems and find solutions that satisfied both web standards and the client. I used internet resources to help explain the web team's needs to the clients.