Last Day on the Job

Today was my last day of work experience. I was a little sad as I headed to work this morning to be finishing up with it. It has been an amazing journey of learning and discovery. Roo had a nice surprise lined up for me but first we discussed the work experience and also moving forward with the projects I will continue to work on with him. Then at lunchtime the surprise came. He organised a little party by the sea near the office and Easkey, a phd student working in an office upstairs joined us. It was a great way to finish of the experience!

I want to take this opportunity to thank Roo for all he has done for me over my work experience. He has been a great boss and I look forward to continuing on my work with him on projects such as the websites for Letterkenny Women’s Centre and the Let’s Make Waves Project.

Getting There – Sea Sessions

This is my last day of work experience. It’s hard to believe that I am at the end of my time here at Roo McCrudden Photography. It has been a very busy day. I have been working on the Sea Sessions website again today. This time on getting the content a layout for the ‘getting here’ page.

It was fun to work on a new, more challenging aspect of the site.

I also got the opportunity to do more work on the Let’s Make Waves project. I was given the written content for the site and got to work putting it into the different pages. The only page that is actually dynamic on the site is the blog. It is all very rough at the moment and in need of CSS but the layout and content are in.

 

I also got started on the charities page. There is now 2 extra pages to go in, the charities page and event page. Roo and I sorted out the hosting for Let’s Make Waves as well as getting WordPress installed for the site.

I also gave Roisin from Letterkenny Women’s Centre a call to discuss the timeline for the project and update her on how it’s going trying to get the FTP details. She was delighted that I am keeping in touch when I say I will and is very appreciative of the work being done. I also took the opportunity to download the sheinfo.ie website that I have the FTP details for before contacting the web host to get WordPress installed.

 

Blogs Up to Scratch

Roo and I had a little meeting this morning about the little bits of work he wanted me to complete before the end of my work experience as well as work that would continue on after my work experience such as the Letterkenny Women’s Centre and sheinfo.ie websites and the Let’s Make Waves project.

He then gave me the rest of the day to work on my blogs. It always amazes me how easy it is to fall behind on them and how quickly they begin to mount up. I learnt early on thought to keep a little diary were I quickly note down what I did everyday in order to jog my memory when it came to writing the blogs. I found this to be really essential because there are those little things you did that you end up forgetting or that day you blank on.

 

Report Completed, Blogs Started

I got my report completed today and proof read. It was amazing to see all the work collected together and it has reminded how much I’ve actually done! It was really satisfying printing it off and seeing it ready to go for next Tuesday.

The report took up most of the day but I had a little time to start working on getting my blogs up to date and making little edits here and there. It crazy to think I have over 90 posts written in my time at ITB.

Report Writing Time

Today I started into writing my report for work experience. It has been quite some time since I had written a report so I did a little more research on it and found this to be very helpful – Writing a Report. I also went back through the work placement handbook to see what needed to be included in the report and also what the learning outcomes were expected to be.

I then began to go through my blog and make a list of all the different projects and skills I have covered over my work experience to get a better idea how best to divide up the information. All in all I spent the day working on the report and got a few parts of it written.

Thank Crunchie It’s Friday

I met with Roo this morning to discuss how it went with the Letterkenny Women’s Centre. We discussed all aspects of the meeting and got a game plan together. Roo also decided that next week he would give me the opportunity to get completely up to date with my blogs and get my report written for the following week’s presentation on my work experience. I did make a start on the Letterkenny Women’s Centre project. Mostly I spent my time firing off emails to get the FTP details for the 2 sites. It took a little bit of work tracking them down. I now have the details for sheinfo.ie and have been in touch with the previous web designer who has the details for the lwc.ie one.

Roo then decided to let me work on whatever I wanted for the afternoon. I had collected some new lomographic photographs from the printers that morning so I sorted through them and picked the best to go on to my Bexter Productions blog. You can see them here on flickr.com. They are of a recent trip to Galway. My favorite is below. I also did other bits and bobs like replying to emails, sorting out different pieces of work, etc.

Meeting with Letterkenny Women’s Centre

Today I went over to Letterkenny Women’s Centre to meet with Mary and Roisin about doing a redesign of the centre’s website and also to finalise the design of the brochure. The Women Centre is an incredibly busy place with lots of things happening all the time. They need a website that they can quickly update and maintain.

We covered several different areas during the meeting including:

• FTP details to access the site
• Design color scheme
• Layout
• Access to different files such as the logo, etc
• Any extra pages, etc they wished to add
• Any multimedia they wished to add

They also brought an information site that they run to my attention as well which needed to be updated in it’s design and also easily updated with new information. It was sheinfo.ie currently the homepage is down, so this website needs to be addressed as well. I found that Mary and Roisin were open to any suggestions and were not set in what the design should be like. It was very clear that the most important thing for them was that it is update-able.

I came away with 2 websites instead of 1 but I have a clear idea on what the client wants and also that they are happy to have WordPress as their content management system which is great as I am becoming more and more familiar with it.

Being Prepared

I sat down with Roo this morning to discuss the meeting he wanted me to go to tomorrow in Letterkenny. It is with the Letterkenny Women’s Centre who their website redesign so that they can easily edit the content and add new content to it. We discussed all the things I would need to ask them and also the different technical details I would need in order to start working on the site.

After this I spent some time familiarizing myself with their website lwc.ie. I also did up some rough mock ups of potential designs and colour combinations that could be used for the site. When I felt fully prepared for the meeting, I had a look over the brochure I have done for them and made any finalized changes so I could give them a copy of all the necessary files on disc to give to the printers while I was there.

I then got cracking on the Let’s Make Waves project again. This time I looked at getting the layout down for the about page. This is far as I got before quitting time.

Computer Crash

Today was not the best of days. Early in the day my computer crashed. It could have been a lot worse though as I had just backed-up the computer yesterday evening so I didn’t lose too much work. The hard-drive was completely erased. I was no good to Roo today without my computer so he let me spend the day re-installing the software (always keep your start up discs!) and updating my computer. It ended up taking all day to get it back in working order. It was a frustrating day but it could have been much worse if I hadn’t backed up my hard-drive so recently.

My new motto: ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER AND THEN BACK UP YOUR BACK UP!

Sea Sessions – New Lineup Work

I spent the day back on the Sea Sessions website updating several bios and adding new bios for acts that will be announced this Thursday. It was a quite repetitive process of checking to see if the bio was already there and if it was updating it and if it wasn’t saving the entry as a draft. I am however surprised at how time consuming work of this nature can be. I also spent the last hour or so updating my blogs. I find it quite easy to fall a little behind and for them to start mounting up again!