Evaulation

To start with this project I admit, I was a little bit sceptical as it involved a lot of new computer based skills that I have not had any experience with at all. The idea of making a fully functional website from scratch and all the information was a little bit daunting to say the least. I did however look forward to getting a crack at making and editing a video. However I have stated that this year my main objective is to learn and improve on my computer skills, this project definitely gave me an opportunity to do that.

I think during this project that I concentrated too long on the video aspect. I got carried away with the editing side of it all, until this project I had no idea the amount of time that editing took. It was definitely my favourite aspect of the communication technology module though.

I ended up making two videos, due to my project taking a slight detour mid way through. First I made one that included all my interviews and I overlaid about 150 static images throughout, of the responses that the interviewees gave me. Unfortunately my mistake was to label them numerically and put them in subfolders, this was all working fine, so I left it until after I made my second video, and when I went back to it unfortunately the video became corrupted and only showed the first 5 pictures, repeated throughout the video. The lesson I learnt from that is to name each file differently! The second video works just fine and is the video on my home page, which is an explanation of what my website is based on.

Like I said I really enjoyed the video part of this project (maybe as Christian has said ‘the penny has dropped’), and admit in high sight that I spent too much time doing this and not leaving myself with enough time focused on the website. At first with the website I was really confused, but now that I have finished it, I have a much better understanding of the process and it is no longer daunting to me, I think that it is something that I would like to have another go at doing. I wish that I had planned my content better as, one of pages contains a lot more information than the others; I should have had a separate page for past, present and future. Something to remember with my next web based venture. But apart from that I have got the general look that I had desired from the website, I wanted it to be simplistic, crisp in design and easy navigate.

Admittedly I did all my research around the Internet and should have looked elsewhere at journals, case studies that related to my topic. I think that I found the workload for this project quite a lot, I should have planned ahead and managed my time better, separating my tasks and allotting time scales to complete each one in. Now that I have done the project and my understanding about the timescales involved in video & editing, web design and production I have a better appreciation and will in future be able to plan my time better.