Blog 23 - Independent Component 2

LITERAL

• “I, Jaska Adoptante, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents 41 hours of work.”
• Cite your source regarding who or what article or book helped you complete the independent component. 
• I decided to make/design a website for someone from school as my "client".
• My mentor just talked me through the pros and cons of online tools such as Drupal and WordPress and decided on which was best to use when designing a website. Not a lot of (technical) research was needed, just creativity.
• Update your hours in your Senior Project Hours link. Make sure it is clearly labeled with hours for individual sessions as well as total hours. Explain what you completed. 
• I finished creating/designing a website for the Kuya organization that I am part of to help a friend as well as try my hand at designing a full website by myself.

INTERPRETIVE

• Defend your work and explain its significance to your project and how it demonstrates 30 hours of work. Provide evidence (photos, transcript, art work, videos, etc) of the 30 hours of work.

 As soon as I was available, I started researching the advantages and disadvantages of three possible online platforms that I could use to design my site, which were: WordPress, Drupal, and Wix. That decision did not take very long and soon, I was setting up bare bones of the site that I was going to make (I originally was going to try to make a site for another friend where she could host the game she was making, but then another opportunity arose in the form of the Kuya organization).

After meeting with my mentor twice over that course of this component, he helped me set up the website and left me to my own devices in terms of the actual look and feel of the website. He also helped me to come up with ideas for images that would make the site come to life seeing as how my "client" also left the design decisions to me.

I settled on using WordPress which I decided would best fit the purpose of the Kuya website. I will admit, most of my hours (almost half of my total of 41 hours) was spent scouring through the internet looking for images that might be able to work on the website. This was difficult because I had a hard time trying to pinpoint a focus on what Kuya is and how to properly represent its values through the website. There was also the issue of finding images that are "free" to use unless I make my own images which I do not have the skill or time for (either digitally or by hand).

I finally decided that I needed to at least try a "look" and see how it would turn out. I began with a rustic/dreamy image in my head which, honestly, looked way better than when I actually tried to execute the idea. Still, I was at a lost on what the site should look like so I kept with the rustic/dreamy theme. The following images are my first attempts at trying to make this particular look work:

The website Pixabay was my main source of images for this look. This particular image was going to be the main image for the landing page because I thought "Kuya is an IDEA...*light bulb*" (Trust me, it was better in my head.)

After hours of looking for images, I finally settled on this one and took even longer trying to get it the correct dimensions in order to appear correctly on screen.

For certain areas of the site, I could not find a suitable image that fit in with the other images I already had so I had to go ahead and make my own. Not only did I have to flex my creative muscles (the little that I had) in order to come up with an image, the technicalities of the process can be draining as well such as downloading the image in order to transport/upload it onto another program in order to make it transparent and then converting the file to a compatible extension in order to transfer it to yet another program where it can be resized before finally being put into the website. (If that hurt your brain, imagine what it did to mine.)

The image from above in its final resting place.

More of my failed first look. Most of the time was spent trying to find these images that complimented one another and the other half of the time spent playing around with filters to get the look just right.

Went through hundreds of pages looking for images.

For my second attempt, I decided on a watercolor type theme. I looked through thousands of images and then started downloading heaps of them onto my computer in order to edit them or touch up on the designs. I used Canva to edit the images and get them into the correct dimensions and Inkscape in order to make initial edits to the images such as removing backgrounds or unwanted text areas or making the image transparent which only worked on a few and I had to use LunaPic to do the rest which leads to the whole process with the file transferring and such that I mentioned earlier.

Inputting images and editing the necessary information for the "The Team" section of the website. This was particularly time consuming because the widgets used to contain the information was glitchy.

The final product. If you're wondering why I don't just set a link instead of posting all these images, well, I've got a pretty funny (and tragic) story.

The website offers a 'cart' feature that allows transactions to be made. I used this plugin (pictured above) as a placeholder until I could find a better looking plugin. If you notice the time stamp on the bottom right corner of the image, I planned on making that change today. Long story short, I got home and found a better (and more aesthetically pleasing) cart feature. Two and a half mouse-clicks later, I try to activate said plugin which effectively crashed my website.

I type this as I hold back my imaginary tears in memory of my first website. On the bright side, I have reached out to my mentor to help me manually remove the plugin which is only accessible through his workplace as it needs to be removed directly from the database that is only found through their company server that I unfortunately do not have access to from home.

Disclaimer: That is not me pictured above. One only wishes they looked that good while crying.

APPLIED

• How did the component help you understand the foundation of your topic better? Please include specific examples to illustrate this. 
• This helped me think about ways to utilize my three answers, which were 3 different types of approaches to design. With my client giving me the freedom to come up with the design itself, I was able to try and approach it all 3 different ways and only settling on the method that best fit the site's/organization's purpose. However, while it was a great thing to have that creative freedom, it was also frustrating and time consuming. This is mainly due to the fact that the foundation/purpose of the site was difficult to pinpoint which in turn made it even harder to come up with a design concept. For instance, the purpose of a website is what a lot of my research sources stress that need to be set in stone before any designing occurs. It was hard to do so in this project because I was only given so much information and the organization itself went through some redefining of its goal/identity. This component also helped to strengthen my preferences for using programs such as Brackets over platforms like WordPress in order to create websites because I feel as though I was limited in my options to change the actual coding of the template in fear of breaking something that it's system may not be able to recognize.