Diary

Production (Week 10 Term 2) - this week is the final week before my project is due! The last few days have been used frantically modifying this website and checking it for errors which I may have overlooked. I originally planned to produce a cd at school which will be part of my final project, but have decided that it was really unnecessary. The website has been completely uploaded and I am quite pleased at the results that I have achieved.

Cover Design (Week 9 Term 2) - this week I designed a cover for the cd version of my website. This was printed out at school as the printers at school are of higher quality. However, I am starting to doubt whether it is actually necessary. The cover turned out better than I planned, but I tried not to use too much time as this was only a small part of my project. The last two days of the week I spent spell checking the website and making sure that all the links worked.

Testing (Week 8 Term 2) - evaluation is a very important part of my project so I had devoted a whole week to this one task. I feel this was one of my best planning decisions as I found a total of twenty mistakes on my website! Much thanks must go to the several people who helped me test the trial version of my site and provided invaluable feedback. Several parts of my website were checked including broken graphics or links, spelling or grammar mistakes and navigation. The website was also tested on a variety of browsers, especially Internet Explorer as it is the one used at school.

Graphics and Articles (Week 7 Term 2) - the trial version of this website was uploaded as planned. Articles and graphics obtained earlier were finally added to my website. This was actually more time consuming than I first planned. All these pages were hyper linked to a main menu and linked to each other where appropriate for easier navigation.

Reports and Statistics (Week 6 Term 2) - using the graphs I created earlier this week using Microsoft Excel, I created a series of reports. These reports displayed the statistics with speed and simplicity. A table of the same statistics was also created so the user could contrast the differences between the two.

Incorporate Database (Week 5 Term 2) - the database I created using Microsoft Access was used to create a menu in HTML linked to several tables as I had previously planned. However, at the time my plan was created, I forgot to consider that the web server I would be uploading my website to could not support Microsoft Access requests. What all this meant was that the forms I created to access my database could not be transferred to my website.

Incorporate Animation (Week 4 Term 2) - this whole week was planned to be used incorporating the introduction animation into my website. However, the original animation which was an avi file was too large so instead I created two new smaller introductions in RealMedia. They both can be seen in the Plaza.

Edit Graphics (Week 3 Term 2) - Microsoft Paint, Corel PhotoShop and Paint Shop Pro were used to edit all the graphic files in my site. The graphics seen throughout this website were all edited to be a suitable file size, format and display size. Many of these graphics needed to be cropped and the background set to transparent so they would show well.

Get Graphics (Week 2 Term 2) - this week I planned to browse through cds in class or Internet websites and save suitable graphic files. Two problems occurred with this plan. First, Internet website mostly offered only sample graphics or the graphics they offered were of low quality. Secondly, there were no cds of graphics at school. In the end I bought a cheap clipart cd and used graphics from that. I had to carefully select and edit graphics so the file size would not be too big or they would be too slow to load over the Internet.

Create Animation (Week 1 Term 2) - using 3D F/X, I created a set of avi files that will be used as a introduction of my website. Much time was spent discovering how to effectively use 3D F/X as I had never used it before. I found out that these animations were very large, so they would only be able to be used in the cd version of my website.

Template (Week 11 Term 1) - research was very important to the creation of the template to my website. I visited many websites and read several online articles to see what would make an effective design. I tested a variety of templates and ended up deciding on one that was simple and fairly quick to load.

Spreadsheet (Week 10 Term 1) - Microsoft Excel was used to import the data from the database I created last week in Microsoft Access. I manipulated the data to produce new statistics such as the mean, range and mode for the data. The rest of the time I used creating charts for all the data. I had to carefully select the type of chart and format it so that it would show what I intended. Bar charts where mostly used so that the different sets of data could be compared with each other.

Create Database (Week 9 Term 1) - newspapers and the Internet were used to find statistics on movies such as the top grossing and most popular movies. I then placed this data into a database in Microsoft Access. I spent a little time this week creating forms and reports so the data could be viewed easily in a variety of formats. By researching a little into Microsoft Access, I found how to create a menu form which loads automatically and provides access to all the tables, forms and reports.

Write Reviews (Week 8 Term 1) - this week I spent writing reviews on several popular movies using Microsoft Word. This was less time consuming than the articles I spent last week writing, so I had a little spare time. I spent this time further researching the movies I had written reviews on, adding extra information and graphics. The articles I could write were limited somewhat by the number of movies I had seen.

Write Articles (Week 7 Term 1) - using the researched information, I planned to create several articles in Microsoft Word. This looked a fairly simple task on paper. However, when it actually came down to writing the articles, I found it to be extremely time consuming. In the end, I settled on a little more than half the articles I had originally planned.

Article Research (Week 6 Term 1) - this week I spent going to the library, both the school and local libraries, to research about movies and Java(tm). Also, I searched through several websites to gather information. I found that many of the smaller websites contained little useful information, so I ended up using mostly large websites and books.