UWIC DFIM - Nick Gerrard

Progress Blog - Professional Practice Module Pt. 3

9th Feb

Paul emailed me last night to ok the name www.csad-ssl.co.uk so I can buy that today. Still no reply from Greg Turner though so I've researched an alternative, www.swifthost.co.uk which have reasonable prices but I wouldn't be able to get the same level of personal support or as much space that I would've done with Greg. I also got paid today so I actually have money to use to buy the space which I think I should do asap, whoever I buy it from.


8th Feb

Recieved an email from Paul who was very impressed with my mockup of the site and has also secured the £50 I need for the site, which is great news. All I have to do is take a receipt to the School Office once I have bought it myself. I emailed Paul back suggesting www.csad-ssl.co.uk for the site name as its the shortest, most memorable one I could think of for it. No reply from Greg Turner yet however.

Hi Nick,

The mock up looks great, well done!

I understand what you mean about the name being unwieldy. However, it is difficult to think of a shorter name that is appropriate. Do you have any suggestions?

By the way I have secured funding for the £50 site registration fee. If you take the reciept to Mary Wiseman in the school office she will arrange for the cost to be reimbursed.

Paul


7th Feb

I emailed Greg Turner to arrange the purchase of the web space and Stuart Neil who I should have contacted days ago to discuss the funding problems I have had. If a project is going to run over, which it is in the fact that i am producing this work for Stuart as much as I am for my 'client' Paul maintaining good communications is of huge importance and I realise I haven't been tight enough on this.





6th Feb

Today I researched a couple of different ways to customise Wordpress sites. Customisation by coding was touted as being relatively simple compared to other blogging sites but having spent a couple of hours looking at it I realise it is beyond my capabilities. The code is similar to HTML, but acknowledged to be more complicated and I know very little about HTML. The other alternative was far more exciting, templates. I was able to browse about a hundred templates with grey backgrounds and found one called ‘Slined 1’ which fits perfectly with the contemporary feel of my identity design. I produced a mockup of the site with my header and more relevant imagery and emailed it to Paul for him to ok. I also asked for his opinion on the domain name as I am ready to buy it from 123reg.com which was the cheapest I could find on the net.

5th Feb

Received the following email back from Paul regarding my 3 scamps;

Hi Nick,

It looks like we all agree that scamp1 is the design to go for!

Keep up the good work,

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: Kavanagh, Gaynor
Sent: 05 February 2007 08:57
To: Wilgeroth, Paul
Subject: RE: Staff / Student Liaison Website

Paul

This is great. I prefer Scamp 1 too.....

Gaynor

I had expressed my belief that that was the best of the designs so I’m glad they liked it and now I can start assembling the site.

3rd Feb

I imagine this kind of frustration with projects on hold as funding issues are resolved must be common in industry so I suppose I should be glad of the experience! My parents have agreed to send me the money to host the site so I now have to wait for the money to clear before buying the host space from Greg Turner.

1st Feb

As I had expected getting the extra funding from the University wouldn’t arrive quickly, if at all. Paul has promised to look into funding for the site but reading between the lines, I’m not overly optimistic. He suggested a couple of alternatives including setting up a Myspace account for students to link to and gauge the popularity of a site of this nature before money is actually spent which is a good idea but I would be a lot happier achieving my initial aim of creating a standalone website. I didn’t see this coming, a sort of tension between the university wanting a free site and me wanting a particular result for my portfolio. The only sensible resolution I can think of is to buy the webspace myself, something I will need to do over the next few months as I am working on a self promotion website anyway. The problem of funding still remains though as I am living on a shoestring. The email from Paul was as follows;

Hi Nick,

Thanks for your continuing efforts in trying to get this web site set up.

I must admit that I'm not entirely surprised that the university servers are unable to support the necessary script as they have to be ultra secure.

I will of course investigate the availability of funds to support the alternative website that you propose.

In the mean time is it worth considering some alternatives?
One suggestion that I have received is that myspace.com might be a suitable means of getting the project started. I realise that this proposal isn't suitable for massive amounts of traffic but it might be a good way of testing the water to see if the web site is likely to be popular or not.
What do you think?

Paul

posted by nick_gerrard @ 8:58 AM