getting closer!

This last week has been very busy. We're wrapping up our group project and I finished my home page redesign as well (http://pdm373.aisites.com/) as we get near the end of the Summer session at school. The group project is called "Don't Get Frank'd, Inc." and is a resource page for web design students. It has been an interesting experience, in my opinion it went about as expected for a group project in school. I understand the intent in that people will work as part of a team out in the world but it is hard to make it a direct tie-in as people seem to approach work assignments differently than school assignments. I think we have some very talented people in our group though so expect that the final product will be worthwhile. We will have a group reviewing the project next week though so hopefully all is worked out prior to that. I contributed reviews for Photoshop CS3, Dreamweaver CS3, and Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm. I also came up with the contracts, asset lists, and user testing.

I really enjoyed my redesign. It took a lot of time and work but I think it came out really well. I went with a simple-appearing design that is flexible and can be grown or shrunk as needed. Text, images, nav, and etc all resize and stay in proportion for viewers that need to increase/decrease for readability. All pages validate for strict xhtml and my css validates as well. I learned a lot from this assignment and enjoyed it more than the css zengarden assignment that we had earlier this quarter. The hardest part of the redesign was getting navigation to resize correctly. This was solved by using "ems" and that gave me that extra flexibility that I needed.