After entering this phase, I began attending weekly and sometimes bi-weekly meetings with one or all of my teammates. We were each placed in charge of one or two pages.
I had found the plugin that we used for the Gallery Page and I was already working with photographs because of my portfolio website, so I was placed in charge of the Gallery page. However, each person was placed in charge of renaming and resizing(if necessary) some images.
I set up the Gallery to have multiple pages, be 4×3, have each image be a 1:1 ratio, have a dropdown menu for categories, and display their categories when hovering. My responsibilities were also to categorize images as they were uploaded and add them to the gallery. In addition, I also resized and renamed some of the photos.
In addition, I also helped another one of my teammates make changes to the Maker Lab page when she was unavailable or when she didn’t know how to make the changes.
Problems
There were a few problems that we ran into.
News & Gallery: The News and Gallery were shifted slightly to the left due to some padding. At first, I believed that it could be fixed with some custom CSS since I ran into the same problem with my portfolio and a custom rule on the element removed the padding. However, that didn’t work because the padding was put there using inline javascript styling. A teammate fixed it.
Underlines: Mysterious underlines on only the posts on the News Page would not disappear. It turned out that our theme was a child theme and it was inheriting underlines from the parent theme. A css rule on the child theme file made the underlines disappear.
Lack of Content & Images: My team found ourselves waiting and asking the Design Department for images. Sometimes, we received very small images of around 200px which decreased the amount of photos we could use which hindered our progress. Also, as the person in charge of the Gallery page,
Large Video Files: An idea the client had was to switch the slideshow on the home page to a video. It was possible, but the video the client left us was over 5 minutes long. Several edits of the video needed to be made to make it shorter and more engaging.
What Was It Like Creating A Website In A Group?
Groups have their pros and cons depending on who is in the group. This was certainly a unique experience.
I had undesirable experiences with groups before, but my group members all had more experience with web or graphic design than I did so part of me believed that I wouldn’t need to pick up the slack anymore.
It started out kind of rocky since two of my group members would argue over something such as how a survey question is worded while the third would stay silent and I would try to decide whether to stop it and move on or let them figure it out.
As the semester continued, I attended many more meetings concerning this website than a couple of other team members and completed some of the work of other team members that should’ve been done already. Sometimes, it was unclear whether I could rely on them.
The team members that argued didn’t argue anymore since one of them would become unavailable for a week or a few days every couple weeks. The third person also rarely responded to emails. Fortunately, they did show up to meetings if we scheduled them ahead of time in person.
I’d say the overall experience was a bit…messy.
Final Week
During the less than 7 days until the deadline, work was split among the group. This week was for tightening up some loose ends. Each person was tasked to record videos for the page they worked on as well as edit and upload some design photos for me to add to the gallery. I was in charge of 2 folders of photos as well creating videos for the Design
A teammate had an idea to create a Table of Contents document which we both worked on. Another team member hadn’t delivered on their video so I and another group member decided that we were going to give them a deadline. The entire group had a deadline, because at that point, things are what they are.
I added some more notes to the Table of Contents document as well as backed up the site.
Now, writing this, we’re almost done. All that’s left to do is submit.
It’s so underwhelming like noticing it had stopped raining after it had been raining all day. You look or step outside and make note of it, “It stopped raining,” “I’m done with this website” and then move on.