Assignment 1 - MDL Website Revamp

First assignment for this module, and there's alot of crazy things happening.

First of all, this was a group assignment. Initially, Yiting, Audrey and I were in one group. We didn't want to, since we were all from arts and worried that it would be too tough for us to handle. But no one else was left and we weren't that willing to split up, so we remained as one group. Then audrey decided to drop the module, and our group was left with only Yiting and I. There was no way we can do everything ourselves, that's for sure, so we had to ask Dr Julian for help to make arrangements for our group. He got me to join Ben's group, and Yiting to Mei Yuan's group. However, due to some reasons, we switched and I joined Mei Yuan, Guo Sen and Guan Jie for our 3208 group.

I think it's really unlucky for them to have me too, as I had to break the news of me going overseas during the period when we were supposed to work on the assignment. So no choice, we did what we can before I flew off to Taipei. So, sad to say, I had to leave most of the work on the three guys.

Another problem was that my CSS and web skills were not very good. I only knew basic html and the guys being from SoC, were speaking in a language that sounded so foreign to me. Really felt kind of useless and a liability to the group. Luckily they were really nice and helped me alot along the way. Really need to apologise for giving them so much trouble.

Back to the website. We used CSS to redesign the website, to make it easier to edit and make changes in the future. We were not allowed to change the header and footer, so the colours we chose for the main body of the site needs to complement the NUS orange. We chose grey and blue as we felt it most suited the orange colour. We also cleared up some orphaned links, links which trap users at the site, and made invisible links appear (these links can only be found on certain pages). There was also a problem of the arrangement of the graphics in the page which showed the different equipment available for loaning. Guanjie edited that part, making it look much neater and organised. Overall, our final website looks similar to the previous one, but looks much, much neater with a cleaned-up interface. The menu is also more intuitive compared to the previous one.

From this assignment, I learnt that it was important to improve readability on a website and it was essential to keeping visitor traffic. Navigation was also another aspect that users would appreciate as it will help them find what they need quickly.