This was last assignment – which consists of a link and reflective review:

For the final iteration of my re-design for the Juvo website I designed a few more responsive page layouts. I had to trim back the full proposed extent of the original project and site structure because of time commitments. The same is true for the imagery found within the site. I had hoped to create more bespoke imagery that was contextually relevant to the page content. However, I had to reuse the assets I created without time for modification.

I did however create every page to be as responsive as possible and that constitutes serious effort, even within Muse where the application does take a lot of the pain away from having to code and visualise the CSS.

I would have liked to dedicate more time to complete the full site and make the content more engaging, but I feel I have achieved enough to qualify the result for my submission.

The web site for review has been uploaded to my private web space and is accessible here:http://s584403783.websitehome.co.uk/staging/

In terms of the assignment reflection prompts; it’s difficult for my to reflect on the FTP process because I used to work as a professional web designer/developer and constantly dabble with and teach web technology and design. See here for some experiments:http://s605353745.websitehome.co.uk/jfield/blog//

In terms of feedback, I would have to say the whole process of purchasing web server space (if you don’t have a CC subscription and therefore won’t have access to Catalyst) and using FTP software is still something that hasn’t moved on since the early 2000’s. You still require a fair understanding of the technology that powers servers and the various control panels. I will say that if you wish to practice this locally on your own machine, then set up MAMP. It’s free (the non-Pro version) and it’s fairly representative of what you’ll likely to encounter from commercially available hosting vendors.

If you would like to leave me feedback, then please feel free to test the responsive nature of the site’s pages. There are some instances where the imagery doesn’t scale very appropriately but on a whole the text should. Please also test the navigation for consistency – but because I used the Menu widget, it should be fine. There’s probably no need to comment on the structure because the site is so simple.

Finally, I wish I could say I enjoyed the course as much as the Graphics & Illustration course, however, besides from being forced to use Muse – which made me appreciate how good the tool has now become, I haven’t really learned a great deal or engaged with the content because of the way the tasks were set and organised. I found producing self-contained assignments (as opposed to continually iterating the same project) was far more enjoyable – as was the method on the Graphics & Animation course. The lines got totally blurred between the different tasks on this course and kinda sucked some of the enjoyment out of it for me. There is definitely value in running a Web Design course and Muse is quite nice to learn, but the format of the assignments needs some review in my opinion. Also, as grateful as I was to the guest speakers for giving up their time, I didn’t really find them particularly inspiring, especially when compared to the amazing speakers we had on the Graphics & Illustration course. But my thanks go to all the organisers for their time. There were definitely some participants that really learned a lot and it was a pleasure being on the journey with them.