Practical Sessions

The practical sessions are intended to assist you in preparing your second assessed assignment.

Your tasks as website designers are threefold:

• to identify what your clients are offering their customers;
• to identify and define who those customers are; and
• by using the graphics, text, software and other tools available to you, to create the website that presents the offering in the most effective form possible for its intended audience.

Skills

The practical competences needed for this module are:

• GRAPHICAL SKILLS - how to create mock-ups of webpages with tools such as Photoshop or Gimp and how to create effective presentations using tools such as PowerPoint or Keynote presentations;
• TARGETING SKILLS - how to identify and define the target audience for your design (including obtaining relevant demographic data); and
• ANALYTICAL SKILLS - how to undertake a competitor review, by researching who your competitors are, gathering materials relevant to your investigation and identifying certain similarities and differences between them: e.g. by using the commutation test and the semantic differential scale.

Challenges

The student cohort who take this module tend to come from different departments within the university - typically TFTV, Comp-Sci and Business studies. Therefore your individual abilities as students are diverse and probably will be very different to other students taking this module. This represents a both a challenge and an opportunity: a challenge because you will all have different practical needs; and an opportunity because each of you already have a very similar mix of skills to those found in the employees of professional web design companies.

Meeting the challenges

In order to address the challenges and promote the opportunities I place a strong emphasis in the practicals on group-working and skills-sharing. In your groups you will be teaching and learning from one another, hopefully discovering among yourselves that you have the abilities to realise the tasks I will set for you. I see my job as practical tutor are more of that of a pedagogue than an general instructor. A pedagogue was someone in ancient Greece (actually a slave!) who accompanied a student to school, pointing out things of interest along the way. So I will be following your progress and offer just-in-time help and guidance along the way that is tailored to your specific group and individual needs.

Sources of information and help

Typically, if you need more general instruction, I will point you in the direction of hand-outs or weblinks that exist elsewhere that contain the information I think you need. The practical sessions will also an opportunity to discuss specific issues and resolve them in a face-to-face context. But I would like to keep hand-holding to a minimum if at all possible because I have found that it is much more beneficial for you to solve the problems among yourselves.

Practical Tasks

The tasks you will be set will be introduced in the practical sessions and emailed to every student on the module.

• Semester One: Group presentations
• Semester Two: Individual presentations

Key Resources

Rod's Video on Designing a Webpage using Photoshop
http://vimeo.com/89775722

Rod's Video on Analysing Survey Data using MS Excel
http://vimeo.com/88981034

I welcome feedback so if you have any comments or suggestions please let me know.

home :: admin :: lectures :: practicals :: reading :: assignments :: modules :: tutor