Journal #10

SMI has been a bit more work lately. I’m trying to fit it all in, but honestly, it’s been a little difficult. The new website redesign was close to being finished last week, but they mentioned they then wanted a new navigation as well as a few new pages. This new direction really put me back a few steps in terms of the project being complete. I had to quickly redo each layout in PS, then impliment this into HTML/CSS, and have my boss at SMI look over each, give me feed back, repeat.

This project has been a huge learning experience for me. I’ve completed a couple of paid freelance jobs prior to this one, and I’ve never had this exact problem before. I think the main problem was that because I had previously worked with this company, when they casually asked me to redesign a couple of the pages, I assumed it would be a nice, easy, low-key project – not too involved. Whereas I redesigned each page according to exactly what they wanted – I should have really taken the time to examine their entire site, review what was working, what wasn’t, and to talk to people about what they wanted the site to communicate. This I feel led to poor design on my behalf, and later- confusion and frustration as to what this company was really looking for in regards to their site.   Luckily, the site design has picked up a bit, but their are still some designs that I am very unhappy with. For example, on one of the pages, we recently have added a lot of text (really – a lot of text), we initially had much less text on this page, and the entire bottom half (literally, around 500px or so) was made up of a slider that had the many different data options they offered to clients. It made sense to me. Normally, I wouldn’t put a slider on the bottom of a page, but this version was so large, and had a real purpose, that I feel the page really flowed. We have now modified the page so that the slider is still at the bottom, but much, much smaller. They really want to keep the slider on the bottom of the page, which no longer makes sense to me. It feels like the slider is the attractive part of the page, the part that might get people to stay on the page. Anyway, I digress. The problems have come up here and there – but I really feel like overall it’s been a great opportunity and a wonderful learning experience for me. The next time I obtain a freelance position, I’ll be spending a bit more time initially coming up with a proposal – for the client and myself – in which I’ll spend some quality time going over everything the site needs before starting the actual work. Lesson learned. 🙂