So we’re here with the Code Blacks again, Mike Harding, the marker-upper. I see we have things on screen, exciting things happening.

Yes, very exciting things. We’ve got some templates together which we are currently intergrating with our CMS and we’re going to throw them up on the live site.

That’s good. So are you guys using the HTML 5, CSS 3 things?

Yes we are indeed. We are all HTML5s and some CSS3 things.

That’s impressive. How are you guys dealing with the accessibility issues behind IE 7 and such?

It hasn’t been a problem. It all works fine. We’re using some JavaScript elements to serve it all into the job and it all works fine. It’s working a treat. We’re not using a shiv but it’s a similar concept.

And are you using TypeKit?

Yes we are, we just integrated that half an hour ago, and have a couple of things we need to tweak and get running through, but yeah,, it’s working really nicely and it’s nice to be able to use some good fonts.

Thanks for giving us your time.

Hi, I’m Amanda and I’m the project manager for the Code Blacks. So, our charity is Te Hua Rangatahi Trust, which is a charitable trust which works within the Wellington region, and works sports programmes, fitness programmes and arts programmes and holiday programmes for young people trying to help them to be the best that they can. So they don’t have a website yet, so this is their first one, so they’re really excited, and behind what we’re doing, so it’s going to be a great project. Thanks!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Come on Ludwig, I have projects to manage!

More cut editing

We’ve had meetings where we braided each other’s hair and sang kumbaya.

(Positioning stuff)

Amanda Wood from Team Code Blacks, project manager, halfway through the callenge. How’s it going, are you on track?

Yes, as you can see, in the background, my minions are working really hard and our client has been awesome and has been here pretty much all the way through, only leaving to feed the baby, so we’re doing really well, we’re pleased with where we’re at, and we’re actually ahead of where I thought we would be.

That’s good. So how’s the team dynamics working at this waning hour?

We don’t actually feel like it’s waning yet. Someone said before that they thought they’d be more tired at this hour than they are, so we’re feeling pretty good. We’ve had energy drinks, cups of tea and apparently they’ve had shots of whiskey, but it’s fine.

So there’s no fights you can tell us about?

Ah no, I know that there have been attempts to rark us up from various corners, but Mike did run up and down the stairs to “Eye of the Tiger” but that’s about it. We’re just chugging along and trying to get things done. Sorry.

So you think you can still take it out?

Absolutely. And they do say third time’s the charm, and it will be with our team of crackpot monkeys, especially with Hadyn Green here who would like to be interviewed again.

So thanks for talking to us and letting us in on your quiet workspace. We’ll check back later when you should be more frantic.

Yes, we are only 50% of the way there, so I expect things to get more hairy as we go along.

]]> http://www.fullcodepress.com/2010/06/20/midway-with-the-codeblacks/feed/ 0 http://www.fullcodepress.com/2010/06/19/interview-with-code-blacks-programmer/ http://www.fullcodepress.com/2010/06/19/interview-with-code-blacks-programmer/#comments Sat, 19 Jun 2010 11:12:43 +0000 admin http://www.fullcodepress.com/?p=1055 Click here to view the embedded video.

Hey, well thanks Sam for joining us, dragging us away from your computer.

That’s okay, I’m sure I can spare a few minutes.

Fantastic. So tell us about the platform you’ve selected for your client for the website.

Ok well I’m running on SilverStripe, on MySQL database. The reason I’m choosing SilverStripe is that I’m the main guy who wrote it so it was a natural choice. But more than that, it’s very flexible , it’s easy to quickly tailor quite a rich CMS to the needs of a custom site, so when we turned up to the competition we didn’t really know what would be required and now that we’ve talked to the client we have an idea of what kind of features would be necessary, and it’s reasonably straightforward to tailor both the fields in the content model for the site as well as building custom forms and interactions and things quite quickly. So it makes SilverStripe a good choice for this kind of project.

So I understand also that it’s multi-lingual as well which is an extra challenge.

One of the interesting challenges with multilingual is that every site, when they say they want to be multilingual is slightly different and finding the right balance of tailoring the content to the language but also presenting it in the right way and not overwhelming the translators with content. So, for instance, it’s more important to translate the navigation than it is every single page. And making sure that the content management system supports that well and in particular it’s probably the part that is going to be changed the most at the last minute. And so ensuring that we have a CMS that we can make those last minute changes without having to go back to the design is going to be really important.

And in terms of progress, how do you guys think you are going at the moment compared to where you thought you might have been at this stage?

I feel, like I’m comfortable with the progress that I’m making. I do feel that for like the midnight – 6am are probably going to be the toughest time for me personally and so for Mike because we are towards the end of the pipeline, we are making progress on the design, however I do think that our initial plans were to have things finished more quickly. But I’m still confident that we are going to be able to deliver and frankly, the more time going into the design is time well spent. I mean time I’m finding things to do building some of the underlying functionality but, also recognizing that there is going to be a lot of re-work once we know how it’s going to look. So yeah, mostly I’m pretty confident with the progress we’re making and looking forward to the hours ahead.

And what’s been the biggest challenge?

Well the most recent challenge has been the servers have been going up and down a bit. Luckily we had set things up so we could work without a server relatively effectively. We can do work disconnected so it hasn’t been too much of a problem. Probably the other challenge has been…Usually in an environment like this, the different disciplines are user experience and design and information architecture. They would get time to sit down and think about these things, sleep on them, put together, document them in a nice way then hand off to the next person. We don’t have time to do that kind of stuff, we really need to be feeding from one person to the next. So, theres nothing really like formal documentation. It gets as formal as sketches on white boards and bits of paper which we can work with but that does make it a bit unusual, you are forced to go over things that other people have been looking at as well to make sure that you really have got everything because you’re not going to get everything specked out in a nice document. I guess it pushes out the Agile concept as far as you can. But overall it’s been an exciting challenge, as opposed to a frustrating one.

Fantastic. Well, all the best for the upcoming hours and we will catch up with you in the morning.

Cheers.

]]> http://www.fullcodepress.com/2010/06/19/interview-with-code-blacks-programmer/feed/ 0 http://www.fullcodepress.com/2010/06/19/interview-with-codeblacks-ux-advocate/ http://www.fullcodepress.com/2010/06/19/interview-with-codeblacks-ux-advocate/#comments Sat, 19 Jun 2010 10:35:31 +0000 admin http://www.fullcodepress.com/?p=1016

Hi Lulu. Thank you for joining us and giving us a few minutes of your time. We won’t keep you for too long.

Lulu: No worries.

So tell us what’s been going, and what you’ve been up to.

Lulu: Well, I’m the one who is trying to elicit the requirements from the client, which also means that the guys have had to wait for me to give them the instruction of, “This is what’s required,” and try at the same time to prioritise it for her. Because from her point of view, they haven’t had a website before. She’s worked with websites, but it can be a little bit tricky to think about what’s more important than the other. So we try to help her through the process of thinking about what’s more important, or what to think about right now. So it’s a little bit challenging from that perspective.

But I think Julie’s really, really good. She seems like a very organised person, because that’s what she does — her day job is working at New Zealand Archives, so she understands metadata and she understands the importance of standards and things like that, although she doesn’t say it. She was not very confident at the start, but I think she’s starting to get more comfortable, because the stuff that we’re talking about is actually quite familiar to her. So she’s very focussed on this stuff as well.

So it’s a lot easier than I thought it would be, working with somebody that I’ve never met, and haven’t done any background information or research. Because usually you’ve got time to do some research about that specific genre. From that perspective, with Julie, it’s been really good. She’s very practical, and the volunteer work that they do — she, her husband, her daughter, they all work together — they’re very passionate about their work, and they’re really trying to help these young kids to get back on the path of whatever they’ve got potential for.

So I don’t even have to convince her to imagine that the site is for end-users. It’s not like that — you show her the rough sketches, and she’s like “Oh, if I was this, and looking for this event, I’d probably go like this.” The type of scenarios that you try to get your client to think about? She’s already in that mindset. So that’s really good.

So it sounds almost as if there have been even fewer challenges working with a client who doesn’t have a website for their organisation at the moment than you would have expected?

Lulu: Yeah, I totally agree. It’s a little bit of an anti-climax — this build-up of “What if?” and then you get this person who listens, and she answers in a way that she understands. If she doesn’t understand, we can quickly tell. So it’s been really nice working with her, and she’s really helped me personally to understand that communication — instead of talking using our language, to talk to her as a person — as a friend, almost — trying to relate to her as much as possible. For me, it’s bringing out that importance a lot more. Interpreting clients is always different — every single one.

And how’s it going with the team? Is the team working well together? And do you guys feel like you’re moving forward at the expected rate?

Lulu: Yeah, I think so. I feel a little bit that I’m holding back things. I don’t know how everyone else is feeling, but I’m trying to churn out the site structure, the page layouts … just drawing them out as opposed to doing them on the computer, because they can see what I’m doing. And if I have to change something — for example, half an hour ago, I said “Guys, we’re changing something,” and they were like, “Whoah, what’s going on?” I said, “We’re changing a section from here to here.” And they all stopped everything and turned around, and could see what I was doing.

What I’m trying to do is reduce the number of things that I have to do. Because with websites, it can be as long as you want or as short as you want, but it has to have a nice balance with usability, plus having to be practical around what can be developed and what can be designed. The guys are really great — again, a lot better than I’d expected, because we’ve never worked together. I mean, I’ve worked with Sam before, but not the other designers. And I was worried that we’d overlap too much. But we placed ourselves straight away. We never said “You’re going to do this, you’re going to do that.” So it’s falling into place quite automatically.

I guess it’s got a lot to do with our own experiences in our own areas, I guess. But it’s been really good.

Well thanks very much for your time. We’ll let you get back to it.

Lulu: No worries!

How are the Code Blacks progressing just after 7pm?

Hadyn: In terms of content, the content is going like the clappers I suppose. It’s kind of interesting, when we started out we didn’t have a whole lot of content, in fact all we had was pretty much the entry form—we were going off that. So we were basing a lot of the About pages and stuff on the very little information that we had, which is all very formal, incredibly formal, which is what you don’t want in a charity.  A charity wants to be friendly and public facing, nice and stuff, so it’s taking formal stuff of “Oh please, let us into this competition because we really want a website” and taking that and turning it into “Hey, this is what we do and here’s what we are and we help people.”

Your client has been in there from 11 o’clock basically hasn’t she?

Hadyn: Yeah, she’s been fantastic, advising us on what to and stuff because the big challenge for me is that the site is going to be bilingual and I’m monolingual. We’ve got a whole lot of Māori content that we’ve got to put past her and then we’ve got issues with dialect as well. She writes her Māori in a different way to how it “should” be written. Like wananga she wrote “w-a-n-a-n-a” (like banana) but it’s actually “w-ā-n-a-n-g-a” and so we’ve got to change all that around. We’ve got to make sure we’ve got all the spellings right and so I’ve been using online dictionaries to make sure that we have the correct words worked in

Wow, that’s absolutely amazing that you’re actually doing a bilingual site because I don’t think anyone else has that challenge.

Hadyn: It’s not going to be strictly bilingual—it’s not going to be flicking between the two languages because we’ve only got 24 hours and we don’t know how to speak Māori apart from the client, and we’re doing the best we can by putting in as much Māori content as we can for her.

So thanks for talking to us today. So firstly, what are the main objectives for the design crew at the moment?

So with your specific audience, what do you have to keep in mind when you’re doing the design for this site?

So I think it was on Mike’s computer I saw some icons being drawn up, where are you up to with visuals?

What is the biggest challenge you’ve had so far?

How do you think your team is progressing, do you think you are on track?

Hopefully when we come back there will be some pictures for us to see! Thank you for talking to us.

Hello, here with Darren Wood. Hey so you’ve been checking out the sites, you’ve been checking up the teams, what are your impressions at this stage of the competition?

I noticed the chef was wearing a gold watch before so I don’t know if that had anything to do with it.

And what’s your impression of the Code Blacks so far, have you seen their site yet?

Great, thanks for your time!

We are here with Julie. Julie can you tell us about your charity and what you do?

And you don’t have a website at the moment do you?

And how are you finding working with the Code  Blacks on this process, because it must be quite new for you?

And what are you hoping to get tomorrow morning when it’s all over and you’ve got a website?

Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time, we will let you get back to it because of course, we don’t have much time to build this site. So thank you.

Codaroos – Lions Hearing Dogs

Hour by hour…

CodeBlacks – Te Hua Rangatahi Trust

Hour by hour…

Team USA – Timaru Mental Health Support Trust

Hour by hour…