Putting forward our proposal for the development of the Practicum website last week was a positive learning curve from my own perspective. I took away a valuable lesson which I hope I can apply to my future working habits. This lesson was the imprtance of minute planning of a development project.
While this seems a simple thought, it is true that the best lessons are often simple ones. Planning is something that has been missing from my own work habits. My predominant method is to begin with furious activity and hope that everything comes together in the end. As well as creating needless extra work, this method is not good for getting the best details into a website. There are so many elements to a website that despite good intentions, it is very difficult to get it to come together if all of these details have not been thought through and worked out before hand.
These are also the benefits of working on a team where you get to observe the methods of other people, and thereby what it is that is deficient in your own habits.
This is something I will take from the project, and hopefully will apply to good effect in the future. Teamwork it seems, does quicken the learning curve.
Brian.
Speaking of details, here is a good link for help with picking a colour scheme for websites. It offers more options than the colour tool on Dreamweaver, and it will also suggest a colour scheme based on the predominant colour that you wish to develop with.
http://colorschemedesigner.com/
Plans are important but the other side of the coin is if we spend all our time planning and never do anything. I prefer to get stuck in and start doing stuff. I remember some communications expert quoting someoane as saying that 'no plan survives the fog of war'. Whatever that means :-)
ReplyDeleteI have also learned the value of planning ahead. I always did this, but only in terms of 'big' steps and major factors, as opposed to minor details that you assume (or hope) will all work out for themselves in the end.
ReplyDeleteI think that with any type of technological project, details are so intrinsically vital that not planning them and giving them sufficient thought is quite detrimental. Thats what I have found anyway, definitely with the Dreamweaver assignment!Details are just as important as the bigger factors with anything technical...
Katrina
Colour designer was very good. I think we ended up using colour coder which was brilliant for picking our colour scheme. I had never thought about using a tool like this before - I would have used colours which I thought looked good together. But why does this, when you have 'tried and tested' colour combinations already designed for you.
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