WEEKLY CONTRIBUTION: 

this past week I have further looked into how to integrate the RSS feeds into the site. so far in testing certain RSS feed programs, we aren’t quite achieving the look & format that we wanted. the team and I have also considered some options if the RSS feeds just aren’t sufficient enough, possibly just handpicking & reblogging particular entries or even writing our own. on another note i began to research how we can create a calender/events page and how to integrate certain twitter feeds.

HOW TO ENSURE REACHING THE TARGET AUDIENCE:

our site is geared towards people around the ages of 16 - 35, who want to  learn about fun & interesting events going on in the city. to make sure we reach them our team can:

+ CHECK to see via, social networks, which events people are talking/excited about
+ CREATE a site that is visually appealing, one that is modern, fun & hip
+ TEST the site & ASK for opinions of peers
+ PROMOTE the site, by creating a separate twitter & facebook page for the site (possibly?)

Our team, Alpha Dogs, all agreed to create a website in which people could find out about upcoming events happening in San Francisco. Much of the content for this site will be resourced from certain RSS feeds.

This week our project manager assigned the technical directors to research how to properly integrate the RSS feeds into our website. I had no prior knowledge about RSS, Really Simple Syndication, so it was interesting to learn about it.

Upon researching I learned there are many programs that you can download which enables you to take convert RSS feeds and place them in your site. I am still working out how I would be able to get multiple RSS feeds and converge them into one cohesive looking site.

CUT N’ PASTE JAVASCRIPT RSS FEED
This site generates JavaScript so that you would be able to input the RSS into your site.

ADD RSS NEWS FEEDS
This site provides a tool that would instead use PHP rather than JavaScript.

The technical directors were also asked to look for sites whose RSS feed we could use. Here are a list of the sites that I thought would be helpful:

SF WEEKLY
SF GATE
FECAL FACE

This fall semester, I am currently taking the Intermediate Web Design class. Among the ten students, we were randomly split into two groups. Each group will create a hopefully intricate, extensive & complete web site of their choosing. My group, group name TBD, consists of:

SAM ALEGRIA // PROJECT MANAGER
TYLER SOUZA // CONTENT MANAGER
SUSAN LEI // ART DIRECTOR
RICHARD NAVARRO // TECHNICAL DIRECTOR

I will be the co-technical director.

This role requires:
+ good communication to translate & implement the group’s ideas
+ creation of overall web development framework
+ researching of codes & other programming needs
+ creation of the HTML/CSS & other coding required for the site
+ troubleshooting & testing of the site

Problems that could occur are:
- time management
- the difficulty of prospective projects
- the lack of programming knowledge

To be honest being a technical director wasn’t the role i was hoping for, but I do look forward to pushing myself in a category that I am uncomfortable with and see how much knowledge and growth I can attain after the project is completed. Also, this is the first time I’ve attempted to work as a group on a website, so it should be interesting to witness & experience the group dynamics.  I sincerely want my team to succeed so I will try my best to do whatever is necessary. I realize this project is going to be difficult but I am excited & willing to take up the challenge.

Also, here is the link to our required reading, Web Style Guide.

and here is the final site: http://rnelissa.aisites.com/mm2203/zen/zen.html
im pretty happy with it. :] hope you like it too.

so my initial idea did not quite pan out, i couldn’t quite find the right the background image of the unmade bed. so i decided to scrap that idea and work on something else.

INSPIRATION

what really caught my eye was the web design for the treasure island music festival. it had a very boxy, old school , carnival-esque poster style. I liked how graphic it looked and how the typography choices were just as eye catching as the images. I viewed the source and their design was made up of a large dissected image within a table. I wanted to see if i could recreate that look without touching the html by utilizing the divs in the css.

i created a new wireframe for this idea. it looks very similar to the web design i was inspired by. making it helped me layout where it wanted to put each div and served as a reference to look back on through out the designing process. another tool that helped my was a print out of the html code which i used to view the structure of the site.

POSITIONING // FLOATS

the thing that took a huge chunk of time was the positioning all of the divs. each div is floated. it was the kind of process that after going through the trial and error you can easily see how you could have done it faster and more efficient. oh well. i constantly referenced our book, bulletproof web design, chapter 4 on creative floating. it helped actually helped a lot. by using floats and clears so much i really began to understand how they work and i feel more comfortable using them. margins were one of the biggest pains to deal with and even now i could still adjust certain aspects, but i’ve learned to be satisfied with the end result. the way i positioned the divs was to make it seem balanced and clean yet still have a certain flow. it was tricky repositioning certain divs, especially the requirements and the benefits divs.

STYLE

the right font choice and colors were important to me since the layout is quite basic. I decided to pick reds, pinks, teals and greys. for fonts i picked some carnival looking ones as well as some slabs serifs. lastly i will add some texture to the background.

the process was slightly longer than i expected. time managed to fly by so quickly while i was doing it. surprisingly, it was pretty fun at times. i think i may try to work on it some more eventually… well see..