Feedback Forms!!!!!!

I found myself working on my website over the weekend a lot, I was just playing around with things and although I designed my site to be fairly simple and quickly loading pages there was just some odd things that made it look really unprofessional and a bit too simple. When I had got into college I realised I hadn't saved the work to my memory stick but saved it to my harddrive at home! DOH!

It was actually quite a good thing as when I came into college to have an extra lesson with John a couple of the other students was in and showed me their websites and was very impressed by them and gave me new ideas for my site but still not changing it that much from my original plans. The lesson with John was quite constructive too and he asked me an intresting question about the London trip which got me thinking a bit, he asked if the group could have made more of the London trip (maybe not in them words but thats what he meant), in which I replied I felt the day could have been planned more.

I was under the impression that we would be visiting 2 or 3 museums and only thought Steve would give us an hour or two to ourselves. And then John replied with "Your one of the oldest in the group, couldn't you have taken control and found other places of interest to visit" which was a fair point but I just didn't have a clue in where we was going. But if anything like this gets organised again I think it is in the interest of all too look what is going on around the area and to check out places that they would like to visit.

In class on Wednesday we got a little presentation from the students who went to visit the designers mechanics in Huddersfield, Drew, the 2 Craig's and Ben ended up going. I was pretty curious myself and if Steve had of asked me I would have gone but I didn't feel like I have enough work to show people at this stage and hopefully when I begin to build my portfolio the chance might come up again.

From reading the blogs of the students who went I didn't feel I missed much, but when they did the presentation more things got explained. One thing that surprised me is that the web designers use Frontpage to design sites in which I thought was very strange, and with 2 of the workers there had learnt to use Dreamweaver for 2 years at college it seems a bit of a step back learning Frontpage. Having used both programs i've found Dreamweaver a lot easier to pick up and am just baffled to why Frontpage would be used in such a professional buisness.

The talk the lads gave was very well presented and felt everything was answered that I wanted to know. I don't think thats the direction I would like to take when going into employment in design but thats just with hearing about it, I guess when you see it working for yourself you can fully understand it.

Feedback forms was also an issue for the week, I've tried making these before in Frontpage and just gave it up as a bad joke but in Dreamweaver and a quick talk by Steve I reckoned I should crack it easy enough. Although the form was easy enough to design linking it up to my email address was the problem. I managed to make the feedback form work but it opened up Microsoft Outlook everytime I clicked submit and didn't want that to happen. So already in my self study I seem to have spent what seems like ages trying to correct it with no luck. But hopefully after a lesson from Dean next week i'll be able to see a feedback form in action and be able to show me the in's and out's of how it works.

To top things off this week, all the work I did at college I ended up saving on my college network and not my memory stick so i'll have to nip in to college next week to save everything on my stick so that I can work on my site more and get it ready for the test on Wednesday.