Critical Evaluation and Reflection

All in all, I think that things have gone well for this project.

There have been some setbacks and problems - some that were my fault such as letting work creep up on me in first semester and some that were unavoidable such as misunderstandings between me and the charity that cost time - but the vast majority of these problems have been valuable learning experiences. One of the greatest advantages of doing a project like this is how independent the project is compared to previous assignments. I've gained valuable experience working by myself and with external clients that will be very helpful in the future.

I'm quite happy with the website I produced in the end. I have met most of the major goals that had initially been set and adapted my attention as the priorities of the charity and myself shifted across the project. The finished product is responsive, clean and has plenty of room for the charity to expand the website in any way they see fit.

There are some things I would have done differently or would like to have had more time to work on. While I'm mostly happy with the overall theme, there are several individual pages that I'm not quite happy with. There are various reasons for this, but time was the major factor. There were over a hundred pages that I had to convert into the new standard and many of them were large pages that took a considerable amount of time to do. Add to this lack of time I had to contend with the limitations of working within the Wordpress CMS editor and I had to make everything so that it could be easily edited by the charity - meaning that I had to keep "fancy" coding to a minimum in the actual pages.

Working to these conditions and not having as much time as I would have liked is why I'm not quite happy with some of the pages. Beyond wanting more time to fine tune and tweak the pages and theme though, in the end I'm happy with my project.  I've met my main objectives, gained valuable experience, learned several new tricks and produced a product that the charity is very happy with.

Finished

And I'm done. I've been through all of the site that I made edits to - the vast majority of it - and everything is looking good!

Up!

I've just finished copying all the content over from the test site to the main site and everything seems to be working fine so far! I've got a few more things to check over tomorrow and then I'm going to put the site back into live mode and start working through a more thorough test. For the most part all that I really have left to do here is minor tweaks and making sure that everything is working the way that it should.

Almost there

I've just finished stage two of my previous plan. The main chunk of work here has been formatting and updating the pages containing information about current and past residents of the sanctuary. Far from difficult work, but updating and reformatting a list of 66 past residents followed by another 20-odd for the current ones took me a fair while to slog through.

I've also been at work updating the website's e-shop and the events diary, importing new and old data to fill these out.

Live server

The WooCommerce modifications required a fair bit of reading up on the PHP behind the plugin, but once I'd wrapped by head around how WooCommerce worked it wasn't a massive bit of coding to add the functionality that the charity was looking for.

The popups for the Staff Page weren't much harder, but they did require some wrestling with the wordpress editor and how it has weird effects when you directly type code into it, changing or adding elements to some styles of code.

I've had another meeting with the charity and they're happy with how everything is looking, so now the next step is to get going! I'm going to bring the new theme and content into the live site in stages:

1. Edit several  of the larger pages (Mainly those holding information about the horses or those which don't rely on the new theme/plugins)
2. Take the website offline (Maintainence mode) and install the new plugins and theme.
3. Work through the rest of the pages, copying the code which I've already formatted into the live site.
4. Look through the site briefly, making sure nothing major has broken and that key infrmation areas are all functional.
5. Bring the site back online and go through full testing.