Week 1-2

In my first entry for this module, I will cover the first two lessons in the Internet Applications Development module. In the first session, we were introduced to the module (i.e. what it's all about, etc). My expectations for the module was that (as the name suggests), it would involve a lot of practical/hands-on development tasks and projects. To my surprise this proved untrue (at least for this semester).

I discovered that we would actually be tought a lot of the theory side of web development in this module, which I believe will be highly beneficial to us in the long run. In this session I found out we were doing some presenting and group work. We got split into groups of four and given the task of doing a review of a specicif website. We looked at the stakeholders and the functional facets of the website. We each took a specific functional facet to review.

The second session was the presenting day, i.e. the day we would be presenting our finding to our tutor and the rest of the class. This was a very brief task/presentation but nonetheless very useful one. I learned when doing a review that it's best to first do a Stakeholder analysis, this identifies everyone who is involved ranging from the owners to the target audience. Once the target audience is identified the website can be reviewed to determine if it meets their information needs. I also learned all the several functional facets one can use when reviewing websites, I will definately put them to good use in the projects to come.

We also had a look at what tools we can use in our reviews, for example accessibility tools (such as the WAVE), colour blindness tools (such as the Vischeck), etc. These are very useful tools in reviewing websites. The full list of tools we were introduced to can be found on this link | Tools |. This weeks session concluded with us discussing the first project for this module, which is a Reflective Review (i.e. this blog). There is also an upcoming project which is a website review. For this project we are required to choose a website genre to review, for example Music, Game, Travel and Academic websites. I have chosen to review Movie websites.