Client Website Experiance

Introduction
My client website was for Freelance Civil Services, a Brisbane civil engineering company. The website ended up looking quite different to the initial mockups, but in my opinion the changes were for the greater good. (The different versions are viewable on my blog)

Initial ideas/mockups
Before I met with my client I did some investigating... I looked at a number of other civil engineering website to see what kind of style they all follow. After this I did a mockup of what I thought the FCS website should look like. Once I had an idea and did a mockup I met with my client. He put forward his ideas and what he wanted, which luckily was very similar to my own. There were a few ideas we worked on until we were both happy with the design. in terms of layout, colour and the overall theme.

We decided to have a grunge looking site to represent the construction part of the company. Colours such as red black and yellow were used to give a construction type theme. It was all done in such a way to also look very modern, and tidy.

Once the mockup was looking finished I began constructing the website in Dream Weaver. Due to the complex design this part ended up taking longer and was harder than I initially expected. I had a few problems with div sizes and floating divs, and also compatibility in different browsers. Although after some work I managed to resolve all these issues. Once the skeleton of the page was complete, I began to enter the content. It was here when I realised the website needed some small alterations, as the content would not all fit evenly etc. although this was just a matter of working it through until the site looked good... by altering font sizes, heading sizes and image sizes.

Finalisation of the website.

After all the content was added and the website was looking good I began to do further browser compatibility testing. One thing I had a problem here was the font size changing from Mozilla FireFox and IE. This was something I did not manage to solve and would like to figure out in the near future. Although this problem was annoying it did not ruin the site or make anything shift around etc. Other than that, the site was fully functional in every major browser.

What I have learnt from this experience.

One of the major things i learnt when doing this assignment was to back up files. I had an issue with my USB drive that resulted in me having to redo a large amount of my work. Another aspect of the construction of this website that i would like to change would be the planning/mockups. Next time I design a website i will think more clearly about whether it will be easy to construct, and if the effects I'm going for will be worth the effort when constructing the site in Dream Weaver. Other than these issues I found this assignment to be a good experience and I have learnt a lot, from running into problems and having to solve them myself, it is a good way of learning and building problem solving skills when it comes to web design. I am excited to make another client website to see how my second attempt goes, and see if i can improve my faults.