Career Space E-zine

Website: Athlete’s Profile

Technical and Design Processes in Digital Media Development

Course Description: The time, money and effort it takes to develop a new media project is reflected in the complexity of its structure. This course looks at the major responsibilities of a new media developer (content creation and acquisition, UI development, navigation structure, technology systems) and how all of these areas affect the direction, time management and budgetary considerations of the project. Technological requirements and effects of various delivery platforms will be discussed, as well as the purpose of the media itself, from gaming and entertainment to online learning and e-commerce

My Project: For this project I chose to do an outdoor athlete’s profile of a friend who wanted to connect with other mountain bikers who also share Meniere’s Disease. This website also offers recommended links to websites about Meniere’s disease and outdoor athletic pursuits. I created a development timeline, planned out the website structure and navigation. I then designed mockups in photoshop and integrated it with Dreamweaver.

Reflections: This was a good course to see how what we learned in our certificate program would pull together when you take in all the things that need to happen in designing a professional website. In truth, we had done this in a week and a half which is a much shorter time than a design team would have used in the real world. As part of our instruction we designed a “mortized” website, where it is designed in photoshop and the pages were sliced, optimized and reassembled in dreamweaver using nested tables. Realistically this isn’t the best way to design a website, and difficult to update and maintain. The more ideal way is to used CSS positioning where adjustments to style sheets make updating the look of the site much easier.

Please see the website