Practicum: Day 16 - 17

Yesterday, I got to help on a new project =D
We are building a custom Wordpress site for a local roofing company and my supervisor already had most of it done. I only had to add a few things here and there and create a few new custom pages.

Now that I've done custom pages a few times and know how to pull content from the Wordpress back-end, creating the pages did not take me as long as I thought...
What did take a long time was me trying to put in a jQuery slider on the home page that rotates certain testimonials. I have come to the conclusion that I am horrible at Javascript/jQuery =(

The good news is that at least I got the slider thing to work before I left for the day!

Today consisted primarily of photo-editing and enhancing as I was picking out images for the website's gallery and making banners.

Layers and layers of banners!

I also got a chance to join a meeting today. We reviewed one of the completed website's content and how the website's current SEO health is and now it can be further improved. It is amazing how much you can learn in an hour and a half.

Bad news is that I broke the navigation on the website and did not have time to fix it and will have to leave that for tomorrow... like I said... I am no good with Javascript/jQuery...

Practicum: Day 11 - 15 recap

It has been a busy week at my practicum and I feel like I have totally melted my brain by the end of today.

I had been finishing up some interactive elements and plugins for the project I've been working on.

The tabs on the homepage now have a cover triangle that move to whichever tab is active =D

And this took sooooo long to figure out, but isotope is finally working on the website and now visitors can filter the website's projects by location AND type. Woohoo!

Another brain-cell killing problem was when the carousel gallery was not working the way it was supposed to; images would not load until half way on the page, the slider would sometimes have an enormous height... and some other problems. The good news is that we have fixed all of this now!

I did get some breaks from coding here and there, editing some graphics and doing some data-entry tasks, but for the most part, my week consisted of staring at screens that looked like this:

Something special that happened this week though, was that I got the chance to tag along with my practicum supervisor to a meeting with a client and the web marketing specialist. I felt like a little baby learning to walk while I was in that meeting... I had no idea how little I knew about web marketing until the meeting. I was glad I got the opportunity to sit in =)

I feel like it was such a fulfilling week because we have finished 98% of the project I've been working on - 1% because we are lacking content, the other 1% is because we have not implemented the SEO and web marketing tools yet.

The other big project I have been helping my colleague out on is officially live now! Compared to what my colleagues have done, I feel like what I have done to help is almost nothing because it was such a big project.

Anyway... TGIF!
It's time to get some rest =)

Practicum: Day 10

Whoa. I have been exposed to so many mobility and accessibility equipments and accessories these past couple days because of the photo editing we have been doing. We have been editing and cleaning up photos to make sure that all products are on white backgrounds (as shown below), which took up the majority of the day.

The great news is that we have finished all the product photo editing!

The latter part of the day, I got to play with code again, to make sure that post excerpts on the Wordpress theme would show up differently according to the length of the posts.

I was pretty proud of the result!
The excerpts would show up in different ways =D

I am going to implement isotope into the theme, as suggested by my practicum supervisor, to use as the visual sorting system when visitors want to filter out projects. I have a feeling I will be spending my whole Monday doing that. Haha.

Practicum: Day 9

Although it was a productive day at work today, the work is not as interesting as usual because we just did a lot of photo cleaning up and looking for product images.

I must say, though, because of that, I have definitely learned to edit images as fast as possible while keeping them as decent as possible. There were some images where they had gone through some horrible previous edits. For example, a round edge (e.g. a wheel on a wheelchair) is all jagged. Those were the ones that took the longest to edit because I had to fix the edges so the edges of the products are not strange-looking.

A side note...

My practicum colleague told me that the company has been to Google seminars before and they got these cool glasses and water bottle from there!

I usually do stay longer after work hours, but today I stayed much longer, hoping to help finish editing the images as much as I could so we can move on to other fun stuff tomorrow!

Practicum: Day 8

Like I've said before in the previous post, the project I was working on was near completion, so I just made some minor tweeks here and there to make sure that the site's layout does not break on different resolutions. There were also some other things like editing/finalizing the custom post types and reordering some of the current posts on the website.

Since we are now just waiting on the client for content, I was able to step foot into another project!

My colleague is currently working on a large e-commerce website and needs help, so I after I've finished the minor edits on my project, I helped him with the product images.

We had to edit the images to make sure that all products were on a white background and that they all faced one direction to maintain consistency throughout the website. I've only done one category and there are many more, so I have a feeling that I will get to take a break from coding and will be touching up images for a little while =P

Practicum: Day 7

This is my first practicum post but it is actually not my first day at there. I've already been to work quite a few times before and I have been working on a custom Wordpress website for my practicum company's client.

The project I am working on is nearing its completion and I am now just fixing some responsive CSS bugs on the theme.

Here is my work-space set up:

Now that I am used to multiple screens, I don't know how I will be able to go back to using just one monitor anymore.

And a super duper bonus is the office dog, Stinks! He is super cute and keeps us company while we work. Whenever we leave the office for lunch and come back, he always welcomes us back by running around everywhere =D

I have already learned so much from my practicum and I have just started... It makes me realize that what I have learned from school is really just the tip of the iceberg!