From Craft to Code

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

As my graduation date slowly approaches I now have the freedom and the tools to start building my own applications from scratch. I came into this program three months ago knowing I wanted to build web pages for my photography and handmade crafts. Now I finally can! Even better, I can create a portfolio app that showcases all of these new skills as well as my personal projects. For the last couple of days I went ahead and dived into Handmade by Vi - a responsive website that dynamically displays available products and service using React, HTML, and CSS. My first steps were to sketch out a rough idea of how the application was going to look. I picked three colors, created a layout for each page, and loosely linked how the navigation was going to render. In a few hours I was able to develop the barebones and functionality of my site. I chose some pretty simple and clean designs,  added a media query to handle mobile view, and implemented a few dynamic routes for my 'shop' page

As we've progressed further into React I am relearning how to accomplish some tasks that I knew how to do in Node but is done a bit differently now. For example, routing is not a new concept and is something I have done before in previous projects but React handles routes a little differently than Node. Fortunately, both are Javascript so nothing is radically different. Inside of the index.js file I've placed this BrowserRouter which I imported at the top of the page. I then used the syntax I found from the documentation to make a list of endpoints I wanted. The most simple route, the root path, on the bottom to allow the file to read every preceding path as well. The first path here is a dynamic route meaning the :id can change but still render the same layout. I've accomplished all of this before but I did get quite stuck on figuring out where to put my code in React. After enough trial and error I finally moved it into the right spot, linked the component files, a