First Feedback

Ok so first feedback is in... lesson 1 - don't bother asking mum, she cant be a critic! I did however receive some very valuable feedback from my biggest critic, my sister. This also correlated with feedback received from others. The key points are around content:

• Need MORE content to look like an expert - currently only listing one city per country - not enough to make get on a plane and visit
• More information on where this place is and maybe how to get there
• Need more info for the photos - like captions to describe what is going on or why this photo is interesting

More work in the pipeline then. I will wait a couple more days to see if any more feedback comes in and then review the best changes to make

SITE LIVE FOR TESTING - round 1

Ok. So after an extreme battle with my web hosting people (the online chat at webhostingUK have absolutely no personality at all) and Dreamweaver, my site is now live at www.talesfromloz.com.

Remember that the objective of this site is to provide a memoir of my travels and that the primary audience is  likely to be family and friends. I have selected 10 people (including my mother, haha) and sent then the link to the site, and the link to a survey to get feedback.

My form does not work.

I am going to help with that next week.

Forms!

Reviewing the last weeks notes on forms and doing Lynda.com tutorials on inserting forms in dreamweaver - can't believe I am excited by this! I want to create a radio button and comment form for the sidebar of the 'Contact' and 'About' pages - make the site interactive and ask the user where they think I should go next! Hope my form works - here goes!

New Tack with Navigation

I have been struggling with my image-based drop down navigation, as I have mentioned several times in this blog. Well, I am at the stage where I am re-reviewing the usability and I have decided to ditch the drop down menu all together. First, let me explain all my changes to the navigation:

1) Removed 'present travels': I reviewed the assignment brief and it says

Organise it as you consider appropriate but it should contain at least two sections:
i) up to the present (usually factually based)
ii) the present onwards (fiction, predictions or aspirations)

References had been given to past students who used 'past, present and future' but I was really trying to make that fit without good reason - I can only have been places, be one place and be going places despite spending 27 years of my life trying to work out how to be in more than one place at once!

2) Removed drop-down component all together. For a couple of reasons. First, moving "present" travels into "past" was going to start to create a very long drop-down. Additionally, while I may not have every place I have been to in the site in terms of content ready for submission with the assignment, I certainly plan to put this site live, and have it grow. I have been to 30 countries - listing each city would be a beast of a drop-down menu!

An article in the blog Smashing Magazine agrees - point 9. Paul Cormier over at Web Mastery Made Simple also agrees:

how often have you visited a site where you hover your mouse over the first menu element and sub-elements appear. Now you need to stop and think. Can I click the top-level element? Or is that just a place-holder to open the sub-menus?

The hover over was causing an issue, and further, I could not get the look and feel to the navigation I was seeking with CSS, and I set an objective not to introduce more complicated concepts to the webdesign.

Accordingly, the top level navigation is now all clickable and "past" travels and "future" travels each have their own landing page. On the past page - likely to be the largest at any time, I have used the spry collapsible panel functionality to enable cities to be categorised by each country. Presently each country only has one entry, but I will endeavour to change that prior to submitting the assignment so that it is clear why this functionality is relevant.

Bored of Photoshop? A cool website

Whilst I was looking for inspiration for the front page "newspaper" article I came across this really cool website that I wanted to share: http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp you can create a very realistic looking folded newspaper like the one I did below:

Front Page Images

I have never had so much appreciation for the work designers do as after doing this course. All types of designers, graphic designers and web designers in particular - creativity takes time and skill! I have just spent days thinking about what the best home page images for my site will be - and coming up with the idea is one thing - designing it is the next! Let me reiterate - I am not a designer!!

But, with my limited photoshop skills, I am very pleased that I have just completed the first image for my homepage - the idea is a newspaper style image that 'explains' the site - I am not going home and will continue to travel. Here is a screen shot: