May was the month of new beginnings & challenges! I set out on my journey to Icaria island of homeland Greece; to work as a web designer/developer in Archipelagos Environmental Institute and thus complete the remainder of my placement year.

The call was loud & clear

• Call for an update of wildlife.archipelago.gr, a digital library about the flora & fauna of Greece.
• The request: an accessible and usable website that will be quick to download and easy to interact with, both for young students & academics.
• The aim of Archipelagos was to contribute to the Greek citizen’s education

My tools were a small team of talented graphic web designers & a small multimedia team that I initially had to train into using the same tools as mine as theirs.

1. WordPress (php, mySql and some Javascript)
2. Css
3. xhtml

To achieve this we used the 5 step Core Process Map and the Communicative Brief questionaire

1. Define. Where we had to Research, Plan and clarify the customers needs and the tasks between us.
2. Structure In this step our aim was to structure the information architecture of the site such as a the navigation and its paged content.
3. Design. Inspiration came with meeting after meetings and boring hours on the pc screen, but it didn’t have a shape until we all sat down and started drawing on scrapy paper whilst exchanging ideas and knowledge on each others field! and here is my design proposal
4. Build. Code is poetry in wordpress,well for us it was finding out toes around what we where after. Incompatibilities of plug-ins, updates that messed up our work, Browser tests, drawbacks, cutbacks, lost backups and mishaps were all there I promise!
5. Measure. It was then time to conduct a “post mortem”, criticise our work, solve out problems and record the ones unsolved. SEO was not out of the party and it wasn’t a clean slate for us, because accounts already existed for this company. I guess that the last one is maintenance, something that kept us occupied for the biggest part of June along with various updates and it still needs to be maintained apart from just mere data input.

Just follow me on the next post to see the end of wildlife…!!

Calliope Muse was edited by Calliope Georgousi 2011

...more info at the Colophon

Highlights: