Evaluation

In this assignment I set myself the task of learning the basics of the Adobe Flash program. On looking back to my SMLP (Self Managed Learning Plan) I am going to now assess how successful I was in completing this task.

When I set out on this project I had never before even opened the Flash program so I was a novice to say the least.

What I felt I needed to do in the first instance was to understand the capabilities of Flash as I couldn’t design something in Flash without knowing this.

What I had to do to understand what it was capable of was to look at existing examples of it. One place that I looked, which came recommended was http://www.thefwa.com/ which had what is considered to be the best uses of Flash on the internet. When I looked at this site I couldn’t help but be inspired, but at the same time a bit boggled, at the ability of some of these sites creators. In addition to looking at this site I also looked to http://www.bestflashanimationsite.com and http://weblogs.macromedia.com.

Once I had given myself this time to research what I potentially could achieve (in future) I felt more equipped to then given myself a smaller goal to get me off the starting block.

At this point I was on track with my SMLP and was keeping to the schedule, I had allotted myself one week approximately to complete this section so I was pleased that I had appropriately identified how long this should take.

The next thing I needed to do was to complete some tutorials so that I could pick up some basic understanding of the Flash interface and become familiar with the words and phrases associated with the program.

To do this I looked to the Flash program itself for in built tutorials but in addition I looked on the internet at sites such as http://www.kirupa.com.

At first I found Flash very difficult to understand as it was introducing me to terms I had never heard before such as ‘Tweens’ (a motion animation) and FMA (flexible messaging area). In addition to this there were multiple layers to create animations on and ‘keyframes’ (points in the timeline in which a key event will occur) to be inserted and the whole thing took place on a ‘Stage’ (the working area).

All of these terms are now familiar to me but initially it is very difficult to understand and what I found most difficult is that many tutorials are written assuming you understand all of these terms. Luckily the tutorials built into Flash have a much smoother learning curve and I found that I much preferred these tutorials.

For this element of my SMLP I had given myself two weeks to complete it making use of class and self study time. Unfortunately I had not estimated this correctly as the time spilled over to a third week to complete tutorials as didn’t feel I had enough understanding. What I feel contributed to this was that I was held up by trying to produce a web page that held all of my written documentation, I had tried to put this together in class and this had eaten away at my tutorial time.

The next thing I needed to do was to complete a web plan. I had chosen for this assignment to produce a site for somebody other than myself to make the projects end product more purposeful. In addition it gave me a small taster of what it would be like working for a client. As I decided this at short notice I used a recently qualified Photographer friend of mine as my guinea pig.

To be able to create the web plan I needed to know what my client wanted in her website and so I created a scoping document. This was a document to ask probing questions and find out colour schemes, target market and the purpose of the site.

On doing this I was provided with all the relevant details to then create my web plan and it made the job much simpler than in the past.

When I came up with my initial Screen design my client was very happy with it as it was a direct interpretation of what had been asked for, however I wasn’t completely satisfied with the design and after feedback with fellow students decided to redesign it. On doing this the client was also much more impressed with the redesign and so I was able to press on with my new improved design.

The time allotted to this exercise in my SMLP was one week using class and self study time (sixteen hours) I had eaten into this time already because of not finishing my tutorials when I had originally proposed. Fortunately I had overestimated in this department and instead of needing the full time I was able to finish it in eight hours initially. However because of the later decision to re-design I did end up going over again.

I was then able to start production Initially I had allotted fourty hours to this section of my SMLP but this had now almost been cut in half by other areas of my plan taking longer than expected.

When I first decided I wanted to use Flash for this project one of the factors was that I wanted to make images open in a method I had seen on the web already. What I found out after I started the project was that this was a method called ‘Lightbox’. I wanted to incorporate this into my page also http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/.

A major problem that I did have now was that once I had built all my elements for my webpage I realized that it was actually quited a difficult layout that I had given myself and so much of the time I was using in class in the penultimate lesson was eaten up by trying to correct my HTML and CSS coding to make my site work correctly. After class this still wasn’t working correctly and so I consulted Web Standards Solutions in which I immediately found the problem and my 2 collumn layout code had been over complicated and I just needed to slim this down, I had put in ‘clear’ which wasn’t needed I had just needed to use ‘floats’ and ‘margins’.

When it came to actually producing the Flash elements of my page I felt really quite confident at this stage and when I produced the border of my page in lights I did this without any aid at all.

The Slideshow I produced however was done using a tutorial but this went very smoothly. http://www.flashvault.net/tutorial.asp?ID=118

Towards the end of the project my biggest concern was making the site validate in HTML. I had thought this would have been simple as I had not used flash before. What I soon realized was that the Flash code was not compliant with web standards.

To resolve this I looked at the ‘Satay’ method which involved altering your Flash code, unfortunately I felt it was too late for this as I had all my elements finished. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay/

What I decided to go with was the UFO method which alters the way in which the Flash components are embedded in your HTML document. This was very difficult to get a grip with and it took up a whole day making this work.
http://www.bobbyvandersluis.com/ufo/index.html

In addition to this I also learnt a very basic piece of PHP which I didn’t set myself to do but I thought would be good to have a taste of. I completed a tutorial and I am pleased to say that the PHP on this site is in working order.
http://www.kirupa.com/web/php_contact_form.htm

Overall I feel that the project has been a success, I feel that my initial SMLP was well thought out and that I had included everything in it that I needed to achieve. I feel that the only reason for me being of schedule is due to personal choices that have been in error such as my attempt to make my own site to hold my written documentation. This information in now in a blog instead which I think is a much more appropriate place.

I feel that I have benefited from writing the brief myself, I think because I wrote the document I was aware all along of what exactly needed to be done and when. When the brief is given to you by somebody else then it is more difficult to remember everything required with referring back.

I think that the SMLP has also made me more aware of thinking about how long tasks take to complete.

I am very pleased with my end product and am happy to say that I met all the goals set in my SMLP and that the site validates in both HTML and CSS on the W3C site.