Hi there and welcome to the blog, I'd like to tell you all about Anthropodia through the next series of Units. My website will be built to showcase a new game for a large development team that I'm part of. The website serves to both attract new people to the project but mostly to coordinate the efforts of the team and keep them up to date with the progress and the jobs required in their division. Having this website will centralize the team and allow them to function much quicker as we have been operating the group off of a Chinese chat program called WeChat.

Initially, I wanted to do an online website for an ESL business that I wanted to start but my partner mentioned that our group really needed a website to legitimize our game ideas. I had already done the personas, designs and sitemap for the ESL site, so it wasn't difficult to come up with new designs for the game. I utilized Athabasca's student membership to the Lynda website and learned how to Paper Prototype the designs. I feel this is an amazing set of videos that everyone should watch, it makes site design and conceptualization very easy and although the finished product may look nothing like the pen and paper, it still gives me a bit of confidence being able to hold a prototype in my hands and change all the features on the fly.

I'd like to create a website that is a little artistic to showcase some of the talents of the artists who have signed on to our project but at the same time it has to be very useful and easy to access. Everyone needs to be able to get to their division and get updated on the progress with the minimum of hassle. From my own experience, I absolutely hate being bogged down by a password and user account, I find that slows things to a crawl as I have so many passwords and user names for things, I can hardly keep track of them all. This has to be a website that is easily accessible to everyone and becomes all things to all personas without them having to perform a 'login'. I would also like to add that my personas are based on real team members and after personal consultations, feel they accurately reflect the team leaders wants and needs.

Initially to prepare for the course, I went through the codeacademy website and spent a few hours with Javascript, HTML and CSS. I really just wanted to familiarize myself with the type of coding that I would be doing. I'm used to dealing with GUIs, compilers and that type of things, so hopefully by the time I get comfortable with this, I'll be able to upgrade from notepad to some other form of IDE. I am open to suggestions and critiques, at this point, if you have a good idea, I will most definitely take it into consideration. Well I'm off to learn HTML and put some code on a page... see ya soon.

Paper prototyping on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS00UIo12Xk