(Mom, you can delete this page next week lol but leave it here until then so I get credit for my class.)
This week has been so excruciatingly busy! Through it all, though, this final project was like a get-away, or the only part I was really excited to be doing. My mom’s job as a teacher moves around often between different grades and subjects each year. The past couple years she has been a remote teacher, so her website really needs to be excellent for her students and their parents to understand where to find everything and what is going on. My mom is not… (sorry, mom) the most technologically savvy woman alive, haha. So when this project came up, I was very eager to help. For reference, here is what her website was looking like before… she was just utilizing the general template from her school and she wasn’t a huge fan.
I was initially very excited at the prospect of utilizing some cool plug ins for testing materials… as I mentioned in my proposal, the H5P plug in has some great formatting options for quizzing questions and things. However, my client insisted that all testing materials are given on their Google Classroom call where she can proctor the students to prevent cheating. I guess with fifth graders you can’t trust that they’ll honestly complete a quiz on the website with no outside help. So, I honestly believe that my 15-20% beyond what I’ve learned was simply working for a client… I could only really work as fast as she was able to give me information, and mind you, she was also busy with her lesson planning for content for the school year during this time as well. At this point I am so used to designing things the way I prefer, but for this project I couldn’t just take creative liberty; I needed her feedback and approval for everything.
Typically a logo would take me all of two minutes to throw together and upload… but we spent a lot of time going over options and considering color pallets for my mom to decide on. ultimately, she like a pink, maroon, white color pallet, so I then had to configure that to be accessible for everyone to read without difficulty. Then came the actual content. Accuracy and understandability (if that’s a word) had to take precedence over aesthetics. This is a real class website and its intended for 10-year-olds, so it needs to be very easy to interpret and find everything. This kind of limited how many “cool” things I was able to add, but I am still extremely proud of this project because its the first thing I’ve ever built that people will actually use. And who knows, maybe some other teachers will commission me for their own websites!
Ultimately, while this website may not necessarily look all that more “advanced” than my previous project, it was much more difficult to build because of the real-life client aspect. Building a real website that is going to be passed off and used every single day is a lot more intense than creating a fun little make-believe project. Completing his project definitely pushed my limits and set me up to feel very confident working with non-family member clients in the future… Enjoy my little presentation walk through below!