From Craft to Code

It is officially the last week of career development at The Iron Yard and our prototype, even stretched, is complete! Today Kelly and I review the presentation, practice it, and film tomorrow during rehearsals. October 25th is demo day and we are prepped, practiced, and ready to go! I am very proud of what we've been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time! Over the next few weeks I will continue to work with the Center on implementing our prototype and then continuing to maintain it over time. The experience I've had working with them is invaluable and I am absolutely grateful at the opportunity to work with the community and build something that will help sustain and grow the LGBT Center of Raleigh. I am already looking forward to the lessons I will learn going forward. I anticipate a trial period that will require changes to our design. After hearing feedback from the community, volunteers, and members I anticipate a lot of excitement but certainly items tha

Now that our immediate actionable goal has completed, Kelly and I are stretching our project to include more pages than just the original home page. We have most of the internal links fleshed out but the remaining tasks seem endless and daunting. They are absolutely achievable issues. There are, however, many achievable tasks to make up a whole mountain. One of my favorite sayings that has prevailed over the last few days is "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." What I've learned so far definitely aligns with that statement. It's easiest to tackle a project by breaking it into manageable pieces and doing one line of code at a time. For this project in particular, we've been utilizing a lot of Github's tools for tracking issues, listing problems, and delegating assignments. Each day I aim to resolve at least four issues and tackle any that I see along the way.

After spending a considerable amount of time doing market research, analysis, client feedback, community polls, and even a SWOT analysis of the current site Kelly and I were able to move from a rough sketch of a redesign to a cleaned up mockup all the way to a high fidelity prototype! It is still a work in progress but we are able to code in HTML and CSS a functional mockup to display our redesign. We used tools along the way to keep track of our progress like Trello as well as Balsamiq to complete our sketches. Our prototype is available on Github at  https://github.com/victoriarainc/lgbtCenterofRaleigh . Kelly was able to find a Bootstrap layout called Modern Business that implemented a lot of the styles we had in mind for the site. It is already responsive, much more modern, and introduces clean navigation throughout the site. The prototype is still in progress but we hope to have it completed by next week!

A large part of the LGBT Center's website redesign is about the community as a whole. What purpose does the site serve? How does the community interact with the site? There are many questions we needed to answer in order to continue to change the design from what it is.  Here we analyzed some first reactions to the website layout as it is. We gathered from the placement of certain elements what might be important to a nonprofit to display above the fold. We visited other sites to examine those and test our hypothesis. After speaking with Jim, the current web guru who built the current site, our assumptions were confirmed. The LGBT Center's website does two things: takes care of current members of the location including staff and volunteers as well as expands to new audiences within the community who aren't familiar with the center yet. The page does this three ways. It displays upcoming events with a calendar, provides resources for those in need, and allows a quic

On top of the LGBT Center's redesign I have now also been commissioned for a redesign of the Corky's Kettle Corn's website. They are a local kettle corn business that wants a larger online presence in order to expand and increase revenue. I will not only be in charge of client communication but design and development of their website using a few tools I haven't ever worked with before. The site itself is currently build on ZenCart and php - a software I've never used and a language I've never seen. However, I'm confident I can execute a satisfying template and implement it in a reasonable timeframe. I'm really excited to start learning more tools that will make me a more effective coder and freelancer! This is only a sketch of a splash page but it is a start! I hope it will inspire me over the next few weeks to continue to update and modernize Corky's website!

It's official. As of Friday, September the 15th I am an Iron Yard alumni! The next four weeks entail a final project. I will be working closely with a classmate on a project of our choosing. Fortunately for us I already had an idea in mind. Since November of last year I have been a volunteer at the LGBT Center of Raleigh. With my new development skills I proposed helping maintain the site to the web team, Jim Manchester. He came back with the suggestion to do a full page redesign! This is a huge undertaking and one I intend to pour my heart and soul into so the main viable product I can deliver by the end of the four weeks is a high fidelity prototype of the home page. That is just a fancy term for a coded mockup. My project partner Kelly from DesignBright will be in charge of technical writing, SWOT analysis, and market research. As well, she will be a developer and lead designer for the project. We intend to update the LGBT Center's webpage to modern standards, introduce