callmenoorblog

Project CNM

I’ve had my personal website (callmenoor.com) for a few years now and its not at the place I want it to be yet. My initial plan of building it slowly and updating it every couple months, to give myself time to learn new things and add new features, was great for when I was doing it, but right now just isn’t the vibe. So what I’m going to do instead is spend my newly gained free time to properly plan, design and implement the site to fully show what I’m capable of and to display all of my lovely work that I’ve done over the years. This blog is a plan… of the plan. It’ll have quite a bit in it. Hold on tight because this might as well be a brain vomit with what I’m about to go through.

What do I have right now?

The “half-baked” projects I have right now are (just a brief line about each, I’ll go into further detail later):

  • Callmenoor.com which is my personal website that I built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript during my gap year from university.
  • Fitness Example is a website I built for a friend who needed a site for their personal training business just before lockdown. Unfortunately when lockdown hit, they told me they wouldn’t be able to pay me for it and I had to stop working on it. I later thought that putting it on my website would be a good idea. No, it’s not finished and shouldn’t have been put up at all.
  • Just the 2 of us is a project I came up with for one of my modules in university and I most definitely tried to bite off more than I could chew with that one. Still disappointed I didn’t get to completely finish that one.
  • Last but certainly not least, is Bratz World. My final year project. I didn’t plan it well enough and then when it came to designing and building, I kept finding places I hadn’t fully thought out and not knowing what to do.

Callmenoor.com

It has 5 sections including banner, welcome message, recent work, links to my portfolios and a footer. It is currently online but while I am rebuilding it, I think I should replace it with a landing page before doing the real re-launch of it. The landing will be very basic, mobile responsive and have some links. Think personalised link-tree with

I want the site to really show my development skills and be a place to showcase my projects listed above as well as all the other work I do. For this project, I also want to research some modern website features to make this website feel like “The home of all things I’ve done recently”.

I love the recent work section but think it might do better as a carousel that loads the items from a list/database and has them all open whatever it is into a popup overlay. for example, if it’s a new video, it’ll open a popup overlay and you can watch the video there. If it’s a blog it loads the blog into the overlay and maybe has the option to redirect you to more. I want it to be easy to add new items and maybe this could also have a see more page where you can scroll through all of my work and filter it to see only acting or only things from 2018 etc. I think that would be cool.

I love the footer and banner on CMN so nothing to say there. The navigation is almost what I wanted it to be I think when I do use it, I’ll just do it how I wanted to do it. Welcome message lacks creativity and looks really boring. Honestly, I wouldn’t even read it. Portfolios is embarrassing. No creativity, no design, no love. Redesign essentially the whole “content” area of the site.

Fitness example

Remove it and start again. Re-plan, re-design and just redo. Start again, maybe even don’t. I get it, it was a lot of time and effort but it’s gone. It’s not worth even saving and maybe it can be a fun project for later but not worth doing now.

Just the 2 of us

My baby. My heart. This project isn’t online anywhere so you can’t see it for yourself but I have attached pictures. JT2OU is an online date activity where you and your partner can share music based on prompts that you choose or write. It will go for several rounds and each round consists of one player selecting a prompt, then both players being able to search Spotify to find a song that fits the prompt and then a screen that will play a couple seconds of each song and a moment to talk to your partner about your song choices before doing it again and having the other player choose a song.

I know if I had the time when I was initially building it, it would’ve definitely been closer to the final intended product but it was no where near and so I left it for when I did have time. That time is now but its been over 6 months and I will need to re- excite myself with the project because in my head it’s been dead and gone for a long time. I’ve more or less already got the plan so when it’s time, I will just start again using the previous plan-design-code but building on each stage. The stack I used for this project was mainly CodeIgniter, PHP, HTML, CSS and Javascript. I tried to include JQuery, Ajax and REST API but I’m still very new to all of those and had no idea what I was doing and feel like I will definitely need them if I want to finish this project.

Bratz World

Bratz World is a recreation of the old school Bratz website from the early 2000s but with modern web technologies. I wanted it to look like what the Bratz.com website should’ve looked like if it was still around. I’m actually super proud of how well I was able to follow the plan and design in the implementation of this one, the only issue was the plan and design were only like 60% complete and when it came to all the grey space in the website, I didn’t know what to do. I’m definitely going to write a full blog for this project as I definitely think it deserves being talked about from a learning stand point for myself but also I have a lot to say about it.

Bratz world consisted of a banner, welcome message, Meet the Bratz yearbook grid, a dolls collection carousel, movie watch page, a download page and an extra page I made just for the rock angels collection. I was also told to include a login page and account management capabilities but it didn’t go well and I didn’t get the end product I wanted. I think this project needs a full break down and re-planning as it was very rushed. Now that it isn’t part of my final year project, I can actually take some more time and put more thought into everything at my own pace. I had a lot going on at the beginning of this year and that did affect most of my work during that time but now I am working to fix it. The stack I used was CodeIgniter, PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I wanted to learn REACT but I was having trouble separating myself from learning REACT and building the website and kept getting distracted and just resorted to building it using what I knew already. A good part of the planning section will now be focused on what tools would be best for the execution of this project and also don’t simplify the project to fit what you know how to do. Go above and beyond and do what you can to actually go there.

What now?

While writing this, I have decided that the CMN landing page will be taking priority and I am going to write up a plan for that soon. The other projects, I will be working on them, in their entirety, one after the other. I think trying to build any of them at the same time will affect the result and slow me down and I don’t want that. I want to give these projects my 100% attention. This is the order they will be built:

  • CMN Landing
  • CMN Full site (incorporate landing into a “link tree”)
  • Just the 2 of us
  • Bratz World
  • (maybe) Fitness Example

The CMN landing will not be a limited time use, I think having a mini version of my site for when people what to know more about projects will be useful for social media links and maybe even when I give out my info to new people. This can then become a “Enter to full site” thing where users will be able to see all the content on my site. This will definitely need extensive planning and designing and I want it to flow. JT2OU is better designed than Bratz world at the minute and I think will be slightly easier to pick up from and build with. Bratz world I want to be redesigned completely and that will take a lot of time and I will need this time working on all the others to let Bratz World marinate. CMN Landing plan will commence on Monday hopefully so I will be sure to update as soon as I can when I’ve finished.

Thank you for reading this, I will definitely be writing about all the other stages in these projects and I hope to see you back when I do. I would love to hear your thoughts on each topic and if you know anything that may help when building, I would love to know.

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