Lucky for him, I had taken a very basic HTML class back in 2005 (yikes, I know) and a basic C++ class freshman year of college to program a lego robotic. The technical formatting and flow knowledge of the languages wasn't there, however the logical thought process was. Before March I dabbled in php/html/css and what not attempting to make my own cool website shirefox.com which has since been blank slated and was never very cool. In March when I started the programming Pollis it was a daunting task learning everything for php/mysql/css/html as well as setting up the server. Somehow stuck to my guns and crunched through ~20 hours a week of work after my 8-4 day job.
A big breakthrough came when we got a friend of mine to give us some css layouts which looked stunning however when translated into the basic beta structure of our website looked spaced out, uneven, chopped up and a bit discolored. This wasn't the designers fault, it was my fault for accepting code used on webpagemaker and it was all structured by individual div tags and styles within each div tag.
Initial concept designs:
Followed by:
The smart, efficient way (which is how it's set up now) is to use a .css file and put all the formats into one document and pull up that document per page. Another downfall of the initial layouts were that everything was set up to be static, frozen in place on the screen based on hard pixels left and top. When applied to variable comment sizes, number of posts, and general "we'll never know how big the division is going to be" results, these formats were mind boggling to try and control. These results were all completed during our very soft and rookie launch on October 25th 2012.
Here's what's live now after much detail refinement:
The following day I departed for a week long road trip where I flew to Vegas and drove back to MA with a friend of mine moving from LA to MA. That story will be the next blog post (hopefully done on Sunday pending NFL craziness).
With the time off and not looking at code or a computer or the website, it gave my brain a much needed reset. When I was ready to take on The Pollis programming again, I realized how JV and unprofessional it looked (Not saying the current designs are state of the art, but they are a lot more fluid and consistent). Combined with the realization, Jake was pleasant enough to come up with 20 something things that needed to be changed/added. Since we were hacking away at our product, I added in a bunch of things to help make it more user friendly/simple. Ended up with near 50 todo items a few of which were 8 hour jobs in themselves i.e.: notification system, separate pages for editing blogs and user profiles, etc. Thanks Jake. But, we'd love feedback. With that, I took to Dreamweaver and started making new layouts. It was only supposed to be for the front page but once I got fluid with software and the divs and how to make everything neatly organized, the rest of the pages went by like a breeze. Once all the layouts were completed it was like I was doing surgery on the code taking bits and pieces of php and plugging them into the layouts. This operation took just under 2 months and culminated on December 21st, 2012. Yes, I finished it around 2:00 AM EST on the day of the "Apocalypse". Maybe we're the new beginning to bring some light to portions of humanity, who's to tell yet.
As any of my followers should notice, I'm actually writing a blog post instead of hammering down lines of code which means the portion of work for me on the Pollis has slowed down a bit while we try and find bugs/ get new blogs to sign up and get the ever important readers to sign up and show their blogs that they care. Plus the more blogs and the more user feed back within the site we get, the more the nifty algorithms get to be executed.
Follow the action as we go from ground zero and take off with your help.
@shirefoxx
@The_Pollis
Pollis Facebook
No comments:
Post a Comment