Alisa Gaither / Final Project

alisagaither.com

 

My final project for I310 is a portfolio website that I will use in my professional career as a graphic designer. As a newbie to any HTML and CSS coding, this project allowed me to get more comfortable with these skills, as well as learn some Javascript and Flash animation. I developed an identity for myself as a designer, which I show in my original logo that I created, and I intend on further establishing this design aesthetic into the rest of the website.

The process of creating this website was straightforward from the beginning, I knew I had to do a lot of planning at the beginning so that I would know what skills I needed to do which parts of the site. For instance, I was already comfortable with designing the logo and slideshow elements in Indesign and Photoshop, but I needed to learn Javascript and Flash to build the actual slideshow itself. Online tutorials guided me through the skills I needed to learn to accomplish these tasks.

At this point, I would not say that my site is finished, I still wish to learn more about integrating graphic design and web design into a seamless product. This is what my goal was, but I came out of this project timeline with a template for what my site will grow from in the coming months. I intend to develop my design more, and learn more about how to build websites so that I can hopefully use these skills in a future job. I also plan on integrating more social media into my website, so it will be more accessible and able to be shared across multiple avenues.

Final i310 Project Flash Website

http://www.aboutmei.com

I chose to do a flash website for my final project for a friend that owns her own hair salon business on the north side of Indianapolis. I chose to develop a website in flash because I had never worked in flash before and to develop my skills within this adobe product. I am very familiar with other adobe products flash is just one of the subcategories I had not explored yet.

Over all I liked working in flash because it allows the user to become a lot more interactive with the website. The way flash develops websites is strictly visual based rather then having to mess with a ton of code. There is some code involved of course when developing a website. I also had to explore PHP in order to develop the contact form that is on the website. This gives the salon clients a chance to become apart of About Mei by being on an email list serve. There was no trouble with hosting the webs item but one thing that I ran into was trying to get the domain name of http://www.aboutmei.com onto my hosting package.

I learned a lot about how to communicate directly and effectively with a client when working on her website. Since she is on the north side of Indianapolis there were minimal opportunities to meet so most of the communication was dealt with over the phone and through emails.

I enjoyed this opportunity to expand my skills within web development and learned a lot about how a website can change the face of a business to bring in more clients. Having an online presence in today’s world is one key to making a success out of your business.

Ross Goodwell – Final Project Deliverable

http://www.socialhoosier.com or http://mypage.iu.edu/~rgoodwel/IUBB/SocialHoosier.html

*works best with safari & chrome

Socialhoosier.com is a website that utilizes the Twitter widgets to present a specific niche of information from Twitter users posts. The niche target market is an IUBB fan so that they will be able to view the most up to date news and information on Indiana University Men’s Basketball. The site includes two live feeds; on the left is a feed that includes Tom Crean, current players and other common IUBB media tweeters and on the right is a feed that searches for all public accounts who include the term ‘IUBB’ which is the most common tag for fans when they tweet about Indiana Basketball.

My motivation for this project was my passion for Indiana University Basketball and the booming growth of Twitter users. IUBB has an enormous following on Twitter and provides fans a vast amount of information from many different sources and many different types of people. I have used some of the Twitter API in the past and thought it would be a really cool way to use an open source language to be able to cater to the IUBB fans.

Initially I was hoping to code using the API and PHP but for the amount of time I could spend on this project I found an alternative solution. The alternative that I found was the widgets, which are Twitter scripts. These allowed me to minimize my API coding so that I could spend more time on developing the HTML and CSS of this site. I began by just jumping into creating a basic site and then each week I continued adding on features as I thought of new things I wanted to include.

As I said previously I had hoped to learn more of the API and PHP though I found that extremely time consuming and had to find an alternative in order to complete the project on time. Mainly I learned more about HTML and CSS because I have little experience in web design but I also added features like the media buttons. I also learned how to publish my site using a domain name, which I had never done before now.

I hope that after more development of this site it may be used by fans of IUBB as a source of news and information about our team. I plan on continuing to work on this site and try to improve upon it even more. I believe those fans that do not have or do not want to create a Twitter account but still would like to see what people are saying on the social networking site might use this site.

Project Inspiration

http://tweetcloud.com/search/term/IU

This is a cool use of twitter that allows people to search for keywords and see what people are saying about certain things.