System Plan Draft

Finally finished my draft version of the System Plan. They can be found here.

There are still a few things I wasn't sure about. Architecture Diagram is one of them. I"m new to WordPress and I don't know enough how the WordPress architecture works. The diagram I've done is based on my current understanding. If anyone who reads my system plan and can help me correct a few mistakes that I might have made, please let me know.

All feedback, comments and critics are most welcome!

Thanks

Choosing the right WordPress base theme

I spent a few days this week going through the WordPress documentations in particular how to set up WordPress site as CMS. While it is great that WordPress has extensive amount of documentations available and community supports, it's hard to decide which one I should start to follow. Different resources has slightly different ideas of to approach the problems. Unless you are clear on exactly what you're looking for, I have to keep trying the different solutions until I found the right ones.

I've started choosing the base theme framework which I will use as a base for the website. It's still at the trial and error stage at the moment and I haven't made a final decision if this would be the theme I would be based my design on. I'm using an open source WordPress theme framework called Thematic from ThemeShaper, which seems to have pretty good reviews on the flexibility and extensibiliy of developing your own theme. I tried a few more themes to see how it looks and Thematic seems to offer the better solutions so far.

Thematic theme can be extended by using the WordPress Thematic Child Theme, which gives the flexbility to customise the theme to suit your design. At the moment I'm experimenting with Thematic Child Theme called Early Morning. Although it hasn't got everything that I need, it has certain elements in it that I like to use in my design. I will need to customise it myself to achieve my design. So far, I manage to upload my own branding at the top, change the page background and all just by using CSS.

There are a few challenges that frustrated me at the moment. I need to put my own page navigation, but somehow I haven't found the way to do it to achieve the type of layout I wanted to achieve. It doesn't behave the way I expected it to behave! I need to do more research and read the documentations.

That's all for now. More progress coming up.

Great Personas Resources

I'm also doing Digital Media Development Process subject this semester and Grant, our lecturer, has put up this great personas resources from Fluid Project. I thought, it came a the right time as we're preparing for our Sytem Plan. So, I post this in here so you can benefit from it too. It is really helpful to build personas and think about the users to be included in your System Plan.

Working on the System Plan

Time flies too quickly for my liking and it has been a while since I put entries to this blog. I have to admit I'm not very diligent on writing in this blog. I guess I'm not used to it and I kept forgetting to write! =(...Oh well I should do better from now on.

The vacation break is almost over already!=( During the break, I've started working on my System Plan. I've got my draft personas and user scenarios. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to do this but I'll find out from the feedback I suppose. I've never built personas before and it's actually quite hard. You really need to put yourself in the user's perspective and try to figure out their goals on coming to your site. Then, think about how would "you" as a user will accomplish that goal. It's sounds simple but it takes quite an imaginative and creative minds to write the narrative stories.

I also started sketching the site map for the website structure. Again, there are a few things I'm not so sure about such as: does site map include the functionality task flow? or would that make the sitemap too complex? If anyone has any advice on this, please let me know.

I have started sketching the visual design layout as mentioned in the previous entry. This will help me to start with the CSS to design the website. The design will no doubt will keep evolving as I'm going through it and learning new things.

I haven't done wireframes yet. Yes, I know! it's weird I should've done the wireframes first before visual design layout! What I meant was I've done the wireframing on my head and sketches on my sketchbook. But only me can see that clearly and know what's going on. So what I need to do it to translate that into a more understandable format so other people can see what I'm planning to do.

There are clearly a lot more things to do before I can finish my System Plan. I'm planning to do them this weekend so I can receive some feedback on Tuesday.

Week 9 - MySQL Database

We have our introduction to the My SQL database tonight. It's a shorter lecture this week and straight on the practical exercise. I didn't find it too difficult only when I need to figure out what syntax I need to use for the queries. We haven't go into too much detail on building and creating data modeling ourselves. There are more lectures on this in the coming weeks.

For once, I finished the practical exercise early!!! YAY!! That's a little bit more encouraging after the last few weeks of what I can probably called a coding meltdown. I have a feeling this is going to be harder later. I hope not.

Start the visual design

Last weekend, I've spent my time to do the visual design of the website. The client I am building the website for has their own logo that the would like to use on the website. I spent time to consider the graphical elements and the layout of the pages.

Overall the website would have several static pages and dynamic pages. The static pages would be pages for about the company information, company profile, etc. The dynamic pages would be layout like a blog entry page. I haven't decided if I'm to incorporate any forms in the website yet. However, while I'm doing the visual design, I decided to have a think about the style for the form page. Basically, I'm trying to finalise all the elements I need for the website. I've created my "desired" design on photshop mock-ups. The next step is to actually build them using CSS.

I have fun designing the visual layout. Once I decided the "look" that I want, everything just flows from there. I hope realising this on the website using CSS is not going to be that difficult. I can be a little pedantic about visual design. It is because that's what I do for a living =). However, I have to be careful that I didn't ignore the functionality of the website as well.

Week 8 - JavaScript

This week is week 9 already!!! I felt like I kept falling behind =(. Last week's lecture on JavaScript wasn't too bad. I manage to do the exercise by doing a little bit of searching on google. I found out that JavaScript interpret your calculation in milliseconds!!! I found that a little bit weird. Anyway, it looks like there are certain amount interactivity you can achieve by using CSS rather than JavaScript. JavaScript probably more useful in more complex interactivity such as google map, validating forms, etc.

I haven't got a chance to look more into JavaScript after the lecture. I think I might have to just dwell in and learn it as I go with the project.