Week 1: May 14th - May 18th

Outcomes: My biggest project this week was developing a design for a website for Orange County's Purchasing and Contracts department that posts suggested bid awards for contractors. Began working with Jeff from my team on some design templates that will meet the client's requirements for the site.

Communication: I met face to face with the client from Purchasing to discern their needs and how our current web applications would be able to meet them. She preferred to use a template that is used for posting meetings and public notices, however due to the complexity of the template and the support it would require for such a small application, we instead decided to use the general Content Management Server (CMS) template with a tweaked summary template to display the PDF files she wants listed on her site.

Next week's goals: I'm going to continue working with Jeff on the new template for Purchasing. I am also going to continue building a Help section for the County's Intranet site.

Reflections: This week I learned alot about iterative design. After presenting one of my site designs for a Help page to my supervisor she made some suggestions that ended up calling for a pretty big redesign. This redesign in turn was further redesigned. It has shown me that theres usually always room for improvement, but at the same time you dont want to get stuck in a loop of constant editing.

Other: I thought it was a neat idea that our team was giving each coop student their own mentor. Jeff and I work great together so Im looking forward to working with him on some of the projects I get in the coming weeks.