This month I’ve done fairly little web design work for myself – but with good reason; I had a fair bit to finish off for university, and have just started at a full time job.

Freelance Work

MobJack Music – http://www.mobjackmusic.com/

This one I completed at the end of last month, but it didn’t go live until early this month (and so I didn’t bother mentioning it in last months post).

It was a job I received off the back of the Jed Davis WordPress theme I made a few months ago. Someone noticed I had made the theme for Jed, and asked me to do the same for them. They were using the same software as Jed was for their music site – BandCamp – and just wanted me to turn the layout they had there into a WordPress theme so they could add a blog to their current site.

As with Jed’s site it was easier for me to just re-code the HTML/CSS of their site into something I could easily turn into a WordPress theme, so they ended up just giving me the design and I worked from that to create the whole thing.

Other Work

University

Well, university is now over; my dissertation has been handed in, all my other coursework has been handed in, and my showcase has been done (although it was fairly poor). All that’s left now is my graduation in July.

By the looks of things I will be receiving a 2:1 for my honours degree – I only need 2 B’s (out of 4 modules I still need to get back), and that is fairly likely considering the amount of work I’ve put into my dissertation and project. I could get a 1:1, but that would need an A for each of the modules I still have to get marks back from, which is very unlikely.

The New Job

Well, as pretty much anyone who has spoken to me in the past few days will know, I have a job! I am now a “Junior Web Developer” for MTC Media – a web design company here in Dundee.

So far the projects that have been given to me have been mostly small additions/edits to existing PHP based websites. Really, most of my time has been taken up with trying to figure out some of the websites structures so I know which file I need to edit – especially on one of the sites I’ve been given to work on (I’m sure if anyone from MTC reads this they will know which one I mean). But I’m assured that it’s not always like this, and that most of their sites use the same structure (which makes sense), but there are some sites they have acquired from elsewhere, which because they were not originally made by MTC do not follow the same structure (and some have quite obviously been made using some sort of WYSIWYG program – Dreamweaver perhaps). This may sound like a rant, but I actually find it a bit amusing having to work on sites with bad code like that – it reminds me of my Myspace customisation days and the endless frustration that came with the coding nature (although I’m sure that amusement will go away after working on them for a while).
I think once I get used to their main coding structure it’ll be fine, and I will be able to make changes much faster (or at least with less agony). One thing I really need to do is brush up on my OOP in PHP, but that shouldn’t be too hard.

Okay, so I’ve only been there for 4 days now, but so far it’s been pretty good, and everyone there has been welcoming to me and the other new start Graeme. I’m sure I will enjoy it!

It’s definitely what I want to do (web development in a web design company) – so that’s a major plus.

Next Month

Now that I have a job I’m pretty certain I won’t be taking on any larger projects. I will probably still do small edits here and there for those long term clients I have, but other than that I don’t plan on doing much freelance work – maybe if any of my friends ask me to do sites for them, but even then it’ll depend.

I did plan on taking it easy next month (between the end of uni and graduation), but it looks like I will be getting into a new routine with this new job, so ah well. I also need to be looking for somewhere to stay after moving out of here (just after graduation) – so anyone who knows of anywhere/is up for getting a flat with me just give me a shout.

I also need to get round to adding some of the recent projects I’ve done to this portfolio.

As my university showcase was the other day I thought I may as well write a wee post about it, plus a bit about my dissertation for anyone interested in reading it.

Showcase

Overall I think that my showcase was fairly poor, very few people turned up (possibly just in double digits – but most of them were from the uni already, the amount of people from outwith the uni was definitely single digits) but by no fault of mine or the lecturers who organised it from my course.

I think the main problem was the time that we were given to do it (2PM – 4PM), but there were a bunch of factors that caused it to be a failure, including:

1. The time slot (2PM – 4PM)
2. The amount of people from my class that showed up (3 out of around 15)
3. The fact it wasn’t assessed (caused many people not to care and resulted in the above)
4. The location (in the uni – 4th floor, away from most of the other showcases

How can they make it better?

In short, by fixing the above problems. In length:

Put it on in the evening

This is the main reason a lot of the class didn’t turn up, and also the reason that there wasn’t many visitors to the showcase. People have jobs that they probably don’t want to take a day off to go to a graduate showcase, especially those from the industry that the showcase was aimed at attracting. I appreciate that the lecturers at the university that set it up probably don’t want to be there in the evening after working there the whole day, but it’s one day out of the year.

Get the students to organise it

Make it mandatory for the students to organise it and attend it. This would solve the problem of only 3 people out of 15-20 students in my class showing up, it would also remove the workload of organising the showcase from the lecturers (which they would probably be happy about). The students would probably be happier about attending too, as they have organised it.

Okay, so the head of my course tried to get some of us to help pitch ideas of what we could do for the showcase, but usually it was at times when nobody on the course was wanting to think about the showcase – the start of the year, and coursework/dissertation hand in week were two of the times we were asked.

I think the best way to do it would be to have each course hold meetings about it (even if it’s only 3 or 4 throughout the year), getting ideas or whatever. Then one or two people from each course would act as representatives to relay the ideas to the rest of the courses in the showcase (at a different meeting) – a bit like how the student representatives work at the moment with telling the lecturers about what was good or bad on the course that semester. If it was assessed then I don’t think it would be that hard to get the students to do.

Have all the showcases in the same area

At the showcase all the individual courses had separate rooms throughout the uni to hold their showcase in – this was obviously a bad idea. For a start the rooms were spread around from the 2nd floor up to the 4th floor, and people just coming to see one or two course’s showcases weren’t going to walk upstairs, or even down the hall to a separate room to see another showcase, whereas if the showcases were all in the same area (e.g. Whitespace) then people would be more inclined to go round the whole thing. Also, whitespace is on the ground floor, much more convenient than the 4th.

Dissertation

I also had my dissertation finished, bound and handed in this week:

So hopefully I will get a good mark for that (as I did put a lot of work into it). The project side of things can be seen in last weeks post: Dissertation Project Completed.

If you would like to read the dissertation then feel free to download this PDF of it and have a read. I can’t say it will be that interesting to anyone who isn’t already interested in the subject, but feel free.