Future additions

Well, as the semester draws to a close and our team puts in the "finishing" touches to the project, I feel that it is time to reflect on what we set out to do as a group and evaluate progress therein and also to ask what feature we would have liked to implement most if we had more time. First off I will address the things that we accomplished this semester. At the beginning of the semester we set out to create a website that would be easy for the average new web-user to create a website and publish it to their own pre hosted website. I believe that this was an ambitious goal, but, more or less, we have accomplished it. If given more time I would have liked to clean up the user interface significantly, and I think I would have liked to take the UI, completely throw it away and start over from scratch. The reason for this is because after doing a level of end user testing, I have found that people have a hard time navigating the menu. So it would have been cool to bring in outside users into the development process to make the user experience as fluid as possible. But, again, I believe that over all, we accomplished the goal we set out to do.
     On that note though, if we were able to have more time to ad another one feature, I would have liked to add functionality for users to be able to specify the z indexing level of individual elements. The reason this would be most helpful to users with an above average level of web knowledge, but would also allow users another level of functionality that we do not currently support. Another thing that I think would have added another level of believability to this project and would have given people more faith in this project.

Nearing the end

Well, as it has been said before, the end is neigh and we are approaching the end of this journey in software engineering, this past week we had our final one on one group meeting with professor Ackley and it actually went really well, while we had some hic-cups during the presentation with things like icons not loading and such, it really went well, and he was happy with where we stood at that point in time and the direction we are going with the rest of the project. So our goal for this week was to be ready to give a 7 minute presentation about the state of our project next week and show off how far we have come to the rest of the class, and also to make some tutorial videos showing how to use our product and what all is available to people. So, John Schulz has been hard at work getting tutorials up and getting that done, which has been a huge help. I have personally been adding the final touch, the so called cherry on top to our program which is the ability to load prebuilt templates and themes to the project. Initially we were going to go with only the ability to load in a "template" that allows users to just have a sort of overarching color and menu theme that they could customize, but didn't really make a website for them. But now we have implemented Themes as well. The difference between a theme and a template is that a template only changes the "template" tab in the editor, where as if you choose to use a prebuilt theme then that modifies your entire project and essentially gives you a completely built project that all you have to do is add in content for and you're done. So those are nearing completion and now all we need to do is have our meeting to discuss the flow of the presentation and we will be all set :) from there it is all about marketing and continued bug fixes, but i feel that we are in a good place overall and that it will all work out :).

Current Status and moving forward

Believe it or not, our last client meeting with professor Ackley actually went well, I was partially shocked. Most of the reason I was shocked was because only 10 minutes before our program was not rendering output or zipping the files we created, BUT we were able to track down the bug, fix it and then have a successful meeting. Now as for what is next: Nail down what "marketing" means. I hadnt really thought about what doing marketing really means, so after thinking about it some, what I believe this means is getting real clients actually using our program, this is scary because of how many bugs we are still experiencing with our program, not to mention we dont have a server yet set up to run our program on and store the database, so this week/ weekend is going to be dedicated to getting this box set up and ready to go with people being able to login remotely and work on the project as well as be able to test the current status of specific pieces of functionality we need. While this makes me nervous, I guess all we can do is see how it goes and hope I am able to set it up. I will be updating this post as progress/ problems arise. Currently, the server is "created" but I need to configure the router and download some additional software to be able to get it working.

[EDIT]

I actually had the server that we were going to use, removed from my possession, pseudo forcefully, therefore, we may revert to using a site like hostgator.com. Again, will post updates as we decide things.