HTML, CSS and Fireworks

HTML
I have used HTML within my website as it is the easiest to use and the best way of getting exactly what you want. HTML also works on all web browsers so it is the best way of hitting the widest audience available.


HTML itself stands for hyper text markup language and is the basic language for nearly all webpages on the internet. It works in the way of making everything as simple as it can be, e.g. < p > and < /p > is the code used to create a paragraph. Within these brackets font sizes, colour and decorations can be added to the text within the paragraph however this is normally done using a linked cryptic style sheet.


When building a website using HTML the CSS style sheet has to be present aswell as styles and formats of text cannot be properly distinguished using just the HTML code. It is very quick and easy to edit HTML code and can easily be copied so to produce multiple linked wep pages.





CSS


As i said above a CSS style sheet is needed when working with HTML. The CSS file linked to the website defines the aesthetic look of the website and determines the size, colour and decoration of fonts aswell as whole page layouts and picture positioning. It is very easy to define these characteristics when using CSS so this is the main reason it was chosen to build our website.


CSS files are also a great way of saving memory within the website as all the style within the website are stored on this seperate file and when the website is loaded the CSS file is then stored within the cache memory and so makes the website alot easier and quicker to navigate around.
Using CSS is the best way to keep the website as W3C compliant as possible.

Fireworks

I found Fireworks to be a very effective tool when creating certain aspects of our website especially the GIF image. I found it very easy to use with the variety of tools and techniques available to you within the software. The layers within the sotware also make it alot easier to use when making GIF images and Vector graphics.
I have adopted Fireworks, not only in this unit but in animation and grpahics assignments, as my main tool when creating, editing or finishing images and animations as i have found it to be so much easier than every other software. I previously used flash and serif to create animations or animated GIFs and the results where nowhere near the quality than they were when using Fireworks.

Evaluation

Here i will be evaluating the entire project and how well the website itself has come out.

Positives

The most positive aspect of our project is that we managed to complete everything on time and to what i believe the best of our ability.
The website itself meets all W3C compliance regulations and is very easily visible on nearly all formats. We tested the website on computer, tablet pc and on a mobile device and on all formats the website was still very easily viewed and the layout was near enough the same on all.
We tried getting as much feedback as we could in order to make sure our website would be meeting the needs of the widest audience we could find. We used everyones opinions to make our website better and better as we went on.
Everyone worked overtime, at home, at college and after college sessions to make sure we got everything completed and to make sure we got everything as good as we could get it and i believe this worked very well.

Negatives

Our original project plan was unbelievably wrong and we got the dates completely mixed up. This gave us no grounds to base our timescales and the tasks we had to complete on. However once we completed the interim review we corrected these mistakes within the project plan and made it much more suitable for us to complete the project.
There was also a point in the project where we all seemed to loose motivation and ended up falling behind. This was quickly rectified however and the project ended up being a complete success.

Production of Website Begun

Today we officially started our website and began implementing the designs we have thoroughly discussed within our group. It has taken us a long time to come to an overall agreement of what the website is going to look like and the tool and techniques we will be using to make our website stand out above our competitors.
Although it has taken us a while to finally have all our ideas as one, i believe it has been worth while as we needed to get our designs 100% correct and able to compete in its market.

Amendments of Project Plan

This is out project plan with the amendments that we have made to ensure our project will run as smooth and on time as we can get it.

Design Deadline Met

Today we compared all our completed designs and thoroughly evaluated them to give us an outcome of the most suitable for our website.



When comparing our timescales to our project plan it is clear to see that we have over ran ourAll the different pages were evaluated individually and if we couldnt reach an agreement between us we decided to merge the favourite ideas together in order to create designs that we all thought were good enough and gave the audience a much better experience when viewing our website.
We are now officially in the construction stage, and will begin building our website from scratch using html and css.

Team Meeting Minutes

Review of previous meeting

1-5:

We have altered the design from the previous meeting to
Meet the requirements needed and to make sure that we all
Agree with it.

Check milestones

5-15:

Up to this point we have allocated extra responsibilities and
To change our project plan as the dates and allocated time
Were severely underestimated so the project plan needs to be
Amended.

See where we are against project plan

15-20:

From checking are milestones we realised that the project
Plan was inaccurate and needed to be changed but in
Accordance with the steps involved we are on schedule.

Update project plan if needed

20-35:

We amended the project dates and responsibilities to make it
More realistic and efficient to follow.

Make a PERT chart

35-37:

Decided as a team not to make a PERT chart.

Any problems:

Updating project plan ensuring dependencies are all correct

Team Meeting

This is the agenda for the team meeting we arranged after creating our project plan.
We seperated each individual task we had to dicuss within each member of the group, and discussed each of them thoroughly until a decision was made.

Project Plan

I have designed and built a project plan using Microsoft Project.

There appears to be a few problems with this original project plan which we have encountered when completing the project. We will have a team meeting in which the minutes from this meeting will be posted here. In this meeting we will discuss the corrections we need to make to our project plan in order to successfully complete our website on time and in perfect working order.

Image Types

The number of of different image formats are countless using a computer system. The most common image types within your computer are .BMP (Bitmap Image), .JPEG and JPG.
Different software tools use different image types and it is all dependant on what software is used as to what type of image is created.
All the different image formats are used for different things and have their own individual advantages and disadvantages.
When using a computer to print photo quality images, these images will be very large files as they need to have the highest quality with a much larger contrast of colours. These type of images formats include .tiff, .bmp and .psd. These types of images are not suitable to be loaded to the internet as they are so large and would increase the bandwidth of the website so dramatically that the website will either crash regularly or load extremely slow.
Image formats used in websites are most likely to be JPEG images or GIF.
These images use a much lower contrast of colours and therefore are alot smaller files and much more suitable for the web.

Creating a Logo

Today i created my logo for the website. Everyone in our team is creating a logo so we can compare them and decide which logo would be best for our website.
I thought the best tool for me to create a logo would be on Fireworks as it seems to be the easiest when creating images from scratch.
I downloaded a template shape of a logo from the templates folder within the software but deleted all specific detail and was left with just the plain shape.
I then added my own details to the logo to create a unique logo specific for our requirements.

Researching our Competitors

Today we decided as our team to spend an entire session researching other websites and looking at the specific tools and techniques our competitors are using in order to gain an advantage in their field.
We found that alot of the websites had very large advertising banners for their own products and massively showed off its promotional stock and its top sellers.

Tool and Techniques

To complete this project and complete the design of my webpage i will be looking at using a wireframing tool. In this paragraph i will compare two wireframing tools that i see to fit to purpose to the design of my specific website. The two i have decided to compare is 'Gliffy' and 'mxgraph.com'.


I have found mxgraph to be very easy to navigate around and finding specific tools that i will need is a very easy job. Gliffy on the other hand when first looked at, is very complicated . The tools needed are very difficult to locate and sub folder after sub folder has to be navigated through before you find your desired tool. I think if i had enough time to learn the software i would be using Gliffy as it does look more complex than mxgraph but with the time scale i have been given i will be using mxgraph for its easy-to-use interface.



After using mxgraph for a short period of time i realised that it becomes very difficult to use. Whereas the tools are very easy to find they are also very difficult to put into use. The interface for the wireframing tool is impossible to use as the tools become unusable when they are implemented in the design. For example when i created a splitting line to seperate the navigation buttons it would just disappear everytime and i have just become fed up with using it so i am now using Macromedia Fireworks to complete my designs and have started to find this alot easier and effective to use.

I ended up changing my mind yet again as Macromedia became as tiresome to use as mxgraph. I ended up using an online based software called mockflow.com. I found this to be by far the best software for me and built the website design with ease. The easy-to-use layout of mockflow made it so easy for me to get the pages looking exactly how i wanted them too.

Introduction

I am designing and building a website for the retail of Lazy Boy recliner Sofa's. We are aiming to lead the market in the retail of these products and are building the website to a very high specification. There are three people in out group me Nick Watkins, Thomas Strange and Michael Perreira. We will be splitting the tasks between us three and the tasks allocated will be dependant on each individuals skills.

Website Specification

Purpose of the Website
We our building an e-commerce website based on the retail of specific ‘lazy-boy’ products. We will be selling a large range of lazy-boy chairs and sofas which will be sold within our website. We will also be selling a wide range of accessories and add-ons for customers that may already have a lazy-boy chair/sofa and want to add gadgets to make their experience even more enjoyable. We aim to make our website as easy to use and as easy to navigate around as possible to give the audience as good of an experience they can have.