Point-of-sale website
Lee White
Columba College
Y13 ICT: Full year project
Teacher: Julie McMahon
Lee White's client for her major Year 13 project was a local forestry products company wanting to sell surplus and 'second grade' wood mouldings online. A new website was required, and, having confirmed that the client interaction could be effectively implemented and that the timeline was manageable, Lee accepted the challenge.
Lee's initial brief established the key attributes required of the site in terms of aesthetics, efficiency and ease of use – both by the company and potential customers.
"The client wanted the website to be visually appealing and easy to use by DIY people, builders and contractors," says Lee. "They are not always fond of, or familiar with, using computers so the website had to be simple, easily compatible with older browsers and with the navigation bar consistently placed to avoid confusion."
"We decided on a minimum of scrolling – with the pages consistent throughout the site, easily scannable and avoiding large blocks of text. There were no size restraints due to costs but it was important to achieve short download times so that the customers didn't lose interest."
In terms of ease of client use, it was soon clear to Lee that she needed to build the site using PHP, a server-side scripting language that provides dynamic content from a web server. While this was a new language for Lee, and one she had to learn from scratch, she recognized its importance in terms of ease of use and ongoing maintenance of the site by her client.
"Using PHP enables a site to be updated constantly with little hassle to the client," she says. "This makes it ideal for the business and the easily uploadable forms I created for the client complement this and will definitely extend the potential 'life-cycle' of the site."
As the development proceeded Lee got feedback from stakeholders in the client company and from others via a wider community questionnaire. As a result, ongoing design decisions were effectively tested and the layout and functionality refined.
The final outcome more than met Lee's expectations; "All the essential requirements of the brief have been met very effectively," she says. "It's a very 'intelligent' site which is completely user-interactive. It's not a 'fad' design which will go out of fashion in a few years – and the code is also quite clean, so it should be compatible across most platforms."
She has also identified areas for further development to improve the functionality of the site. "Working on my coding skills to add a search function and a shopping cart system would be a good direction to go in," she believes. "But as it is, the site is fully functional and meeting the brief."
The company is equally delighted in the way the project developed and with the final outcome produced. It was admitted that the original scoping of the project might have been too broad and ambitious but that, "We, the client, modified our goals and aspirations to the project as Lee, the designer, raised the issues and impacts with us."
"It provided an opportunity to evolve our thinking as we went, and involved a broad range of people in our organisation. Lee remained calm and focussed throughout the process and we have ended up with a great result. We see the 'Wood Mouldings Trader' website as a good base to work from – one which we will look to expand on in terms of use and purpose."
The quality of Lee's development work was recognised by the award of a 2008 New Zealand Scholarship in Technology. In her Scholarship report Lee reflected on the many gains she has made from the project including insight into the possibilities of PHP, and valuable experience in working with clients. "It's been particularly valuable in terms of the 'real life' work experience opportunity it gave me," she says. "It was an amazing challenge to have to learn an entirely new coding language while creating the site."
In 2009, Lee began a Bachelor of Applied Science in Design for Technology and a Bachelor of Science in Energy Studies at Otago University. "I believe that design is integral to today's world, and good design can improve our day-to-day lives," she says. "Energy use and efficiency also impact our daily life, and will become increasingly important in the near future. I hope in the future to have a job in some form of product design, preferably related to how we use energy."
Teacher comment:
I was impressed by Lee's maturity and depth of planning and her ability to handle the client interaction. She had a lot of different people to work with and she managed the interactions very professionally – having to deal with both technical and non-technical input and often conflicting ideas and wants.
When an issue cropped up she would quietly go about addressing it. She really developed her programming knowledge over the course of the project and was very persistent in the way she addressed the problems as they cropped up. Nothing was put in the 'too-hard basket' – she just quietly went about solving the problem. It was a very technically challenging website and she really had to get into some back-end coding to make it work technically for the client. So that was the other part that particularly impressed me – the way she handled the technical demands and had the clients needs in focus all the way through.
Screenshot from Lee's website
Lee's Scholarship Report on this project is featured in the Scholarships Materials section.
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