UWIC DFIM - Nick Gerrard

Progress Blog – Professional Practice Module

Progress Blog – Professional Practice Module

Monday 11th December

I attended the Student Council meeting in December with no expectations of gaining the opportunity to work on a live brief. However the lack of good communications between the Faculty and the students was raised, especially with regards to a recent visit from the BBC production designers who had worked on ‘Torchwood’ as well as other exhibitions and events which most of us had missed because we weren’t made aware of them. Also they wanted to open channels of communication between students on different courses and generally give everyone more of a chance to find out about each other. I pitched the idea of a community website as it seemed the natural solution to their communication difficulties. My idea was for a site that staff and students could both contribute to; a ‘one stop shop’ for any information that would be of benefit to us. The Dean of the School of Art and Design and the other members of the Staff Council agreed that given my enthusiasm and the nature of my course that I’d be suitable for the task.

I gave my contact details to Michelle Brown, the Dean’s secretary and she agreed to try and contact me before the university broke up for Christmas to arrange a meeting as I had stressed that I would prefer to be clear on what they expected of the site so I could begin designing it over my month off. However, in a very hectic last week of term we weren’t able to schedule a meeting and I had to wait until January to get back in touch with the staff council members.

Wednesday 13th December

I told Stuart about what had happened at the meeting and suggested that I create the CSAD Student Council website for the Professional Practice module and he agreed it was a good idea. It would give me an experience of designing for a client that I felt would be more similar to real world practices than undertaking a competition brief. I was also excited by the prospect of developing a site that would be genuinely useful for hundreds of my peers and adding a web based project to my portfolio.

Wednesday 17th January

In my first week of term I arranged for a tutorial with Stuart so we could talk over some of my ideas and agree how I should progress with this project. We quickly dismissed the idea of creating a traditional HTML site as it would be awkward to maintain and timely to produce. Stuart suggested a number of Open Source authoring programs for me to research and I was persuaded to reschedule my meeting with members of the Staff Council which we had arranged for the nest day in order to be able to meet a BBC Television crew who were coming in to speak to us about our research.

Thursday 18th January

I had a good look at the ways in which I might quickly and easily create a community website and I soon discovered Wordpress (www.wordpress.org) which seemed both very powerful and very easy to use. Given my limited time and fairly lofty ambitions for this project this blogger-like software seemed the only viable method for me to accomplish the functionality that I saw as vital to the site’s success.

Monday 22nd January

Emailed Michelle Brown about the meeting, she called me to check whether I was available 2pm on Wednesday and we agreed a meeting at Howard Gardens for then. I prepared for the meeting by taking another look at the Wordpress website so I could talk with some authority about its suitability for the task. The positive points I listed and took to the meeting were;

- W3C compatibility for accessibility
- Ability to create a site combining static pages and an advanced forum/blogging area
- You can set different levels of users, with different privileges
- The site will allow users to post images and even videos very easily
- Users can set up RSS feeds to their home computers so they don’t miss anything
- Search function
- Automatically updating links to other blogs
- Blogs easily organised; recent/top posts, categories and monthly archives
- Largely customizable, both the web address and the design
- Intelligent text formatting

Wednesday 24th January

I had my first proper meeting on Wednesday, with a Paul Wilgeroth who told me he had been tasked by the Dean to oversee myself and the creation of the website. In industry terms I would equate this to a ‘Scoping’ meeting. I wanted to set out clearly what I understood was required and what I felt I could produce. I was well prepared for this meeting and feel that I carried it off in a very professional manner, I feel that it was an important step in my personal development as an experience quite new to me. I outlined the timescale I was working within, my confidence in Wordpress and gathered a lot of useful points about the kind of site the staff (as my clients) wanted. We agreed that other than the CSAD (Cardiff School of Art and Design) logo I was free to design the site as I thought best while remembering that as a CSAD site it had a certain responsibility to be visually appealing. I promised to produce three scamps for him to choose between. Paul expressed concerns about the accountability of comments left on the forum and was happy to learn that it would be easy to require member’s logins from posters. I was told that the name should be as straightforward as possible so the project is now called the ‘Staff / Student Liaison Website’. I explained that this whole project as I had explained it would only be feasible if the university server could support PHP 4.2 or a version of mySQL at level 4.0 or higher.

Thursday 25th January
I emailed Stuart today to ask for helping in solving our little PHP/MySQL issue which I feel is hanging over the whole project at the moment as I am concerned that a the site I wish to make may not be possible. I am beginning to consider worst case scenario alternatives in case the university servers really aren’t prepared to play ball. I have also been browsing other sites and blogs created with Wordpress so I can gain a better idea of the level of customization I will be able to carry out.

Monday 29th January
Stuart informed me that the university servers do not support PHP or mySQL so external hosting is now my only option for creating a Wordpress site as planned. Stuart gave me the email address of a trusted web host and I have emailed him to ask for an idea of how much space I will require and a quote for the cost.

posted by nick_gerrard @ 12:29 PM