Notes from March 3, Client Interview Transcript
Here is a pdf of our chat transcript today. I couldn’t get the chat text to print, so I had to take some screenshots. Hope this is clear enough.
What questions do you still have for the client?
Homework: Post your questions in the comment section here and create a sitemap for Thursday.
Design Styles, Web Roles and How to Break the Box
Reading some articles this weekend, I came across some interesting articles.
LAYOUT CONVENTIONS
The first article Killing Some Bad Layout Conventions is an interesting article about poor layout design. Not sure I agree completely, but it’s good food for thought. As you are designing your interfaces, I suggest you reread my post about web 2.0 design styles.
WEB DESIGN TEAM ROLES
Cameron Moll, a very well known web design blogger is discussing web roles on his site. The question he’s asking Designer, Coder: Separate roles or one? Should designers just design or should they be doing the HTML and CSS too? This is a great discussion for beginning web design students to pay attention to and learn from others in the industry about what they think.
HOW TO BREAK THE BOX WITH CSS
Finally, one question I often get asked is “How do you create a design that isn’t boxy”? Jina Bolton has an excellent article on Sitepoint.com entitled “Breaking the Box“. It’s a great tutorial on how to create a clean, efficient CSS design that’s unique.
Today’s Class
Now that the client project is rolling, today we talked about the benefits and drawbacks of using CSS template sites such as Code Sucks and Free CSS Templates.
By the end of class, your team and nterface designer should have several interface designs sketched out so your XHTML/CSS team can start preparing the webpage layouts. Make sense?
Websites from February 26th
Here are a listing of the sites I showed today demonstrating CSS galleries and techniques.
http://www.ndesign-studio.com/
http://www.webdesignerwall.com
Client Site Project Begins
For our client project, we will be redesigning the Westcott Bay Institute for Art and Nature site. We will work in teams of 3-4 people and you can select your teammates. Your ideal team will include people with a mix of skills and interests including interface design, information architecture, xhtml, css and usability.
After you select your team, please do the following:
- Give your team a name (you will be interacting with the client as a small web agency so choose a name that is appropriate)
- Determine what roles each member of the group will primarily play
- Begin assessing the Westcott site and determine what you think are the problems and strengths of the current site
- Write a list of questions you will ask the client to begin working on the project.
This project currently has a due date of March 27. However, based on client availability, the day may be moved back to April 3rd.
Questions?
OUTCOME: Create a fully functional website for the client. The site must be done in XHTML and CSS and be posted on a web server.
Homework for Tuesday
Read Chapters 11-14 in the “Learning Web Design”
Learning tools
Here is the w3schools website I mentioned today. It’s a great resource for learning HTML, XHTML and CSS.
Also, for reading please go over Chapters 11-13 in “Learning Web Design”
Assignment for tomorrow??
What’s the assignment for tomorrow? I thought it was going to be posted on the blog, but I can’t find it anywhere. Oh dear.
Redesign #2: Cat Prin
Here’s a link to the original Cat Prin website.
My redesign:
CareerMag Redesign
