Taught Elective: Critical Evaluation

Really, my critical evaluation for this unit is embedded in all the other pages in this 'Taught Elective' section of my MA Photographic Studies website: here I merely repeat what has been adequately said elsewhere, but I think it might be helpful to pull together in one place all the evaluative strands and add some new thoughts on how the project unfolded.

The decision to do this elective unit was an important one for me. I started it with an existing knowledge base in website authoring, as I already build and maintain websites for clients and thus was able to apply my existing expertise to the task. However, there were some crucial gaps in my knowledge.

Firstly, I work on a PC and use MS FrontPage as my main web authoring package. Whilst this is an effective tool which I can now use efficiently, I willingly acknowledge that I needed to get to grips with Dreamweaver if I was to start building websites with any degree of complexity and sophistication.

Secondly, I sometimes rely on purchased templates for site-building - a quick and easy way to produce professional looking sites but not really forcing me to work from the ground up.

Thirdly, I have little working knowledge of Flash - something which appears more and more frequently on websites and a tool which I know I need to crack.

As an IT educator (see CV) I make use of the web all day every day for work and also rely heavily on it for personal purposes.

A significant part of my work involves the web - be it training novices in its use or employing search techniques to find source information. I consider myself to be a competent and discriminating surfer. What, then, did I stand to get out of an elective unit on website development?

Well there's always more to discover, and for me it was about maximising the potential of what I already knew by becoming more proficient in web authoring and publication.

Compared with professional web authors, with whom I have worked and at whom I have gawped in awe and wonder, I know nothing. That is to say, I know what I don't know, which is the most worrying state to be in.

I can see huge potential for my own professional development in this area and I know that I could become far better at it than I can claim to be at the moment.

So... I opted for this Unit in order to sharpen up my existing skills and channel them towards what was (for me) a new piece of web authoring software: Dreamweaver.

Before the first session I had already played a little bit - creating a basic set of linked web pages and done all the usual text/image insertion. Being familiar with FrontPage, I found it easy to transfer my knowledge and understanding of web authoring concepts to Dreamweaver - rather like driving a different car (where's reverse?). Of course, this inevitably leads to feeling de-skilled, a common reaction when trying to re-learn anything, but especially when it involves software or operating systems!

In the first few taught sessions I created practice sites which enabled me to become familiar with the apparent vagaries of the software (an inevitable perspective when trying to transfer skills) and learn a few of the Dreamweaver fundamentals.

The session on Flash could only ever scratch the surface, and I left it eager for more but certain that I could progress no further in the timescale allowed. (One for the long-term wish-list, then.) Again, I am familiar with the concepts employed in Flash from knowledge of other software, and indeed I have adapted simple Flash pages for clients' websites, so I felt confident that, in time, I would be able to crack that one too.

I decided that it would be an effective use of my time to use this elective unit to kick-start a much delayed and procrastinated-over task: producing a professional website. As a photographer I already have collections of images online in various locations, such as an online gallery and a Photographic Society website, but I have nothing which looks professional enough to present to clients.

I wanted the site to be clean, uncluttered and easy to navigate. I knew from the outset the kind of look and feel I wanted; that it would be predominantly black or white and that the use of web galleries would have to be an integral part if I wanted it to showcase my work.

I feel that I've managed to achieve that in the site I've produced thus far, although I'm still not entirely happy with the look and feel, and there is much to do in terms of adding galleries (at the moment there are just three, by way of proof of concept).

I chose to have four main sections leading off a simple homepage:

Biog
Galleries
Exhibitions
Contact

URLs

Helen's Photography website