After working on Cooking Up Stories for pretty much everyday of the semester, I have to say its a little weird to not work on it. I’ve enjoyed the process of creating and building out the site so much this past semester. I definitely learned a from the beginning of the semester to now. So in this post I will look into where I was at the beginning of the semester and where I ended up at the end.
Generally, my main idea, creating a website that allows users to create and share their own recipes, was consistent throughout the entire project. But there were a few differences from then to now.
Looking back through my initial proposal I realized that I didn’t do one specific thing I mentioned a lot. Mobile Optimization. And when I say mobile optimization, I guess I wanted to gear my website toward mobile devices. I guess I thought it was going to be a major point in my development process but literally all I did was install a mobile optimization plugin that allowed all of the content on my site to translate to mobile devices cleanly. So it didn’t take too much time of the development process. I also wanted the main portion of the site to be used on mobile devices, but I found that most users submitted their content on the desktop version of the site.
I also wanted to move the site off of my domain, meredithhuffman.com, to another domain related to the project itself. Unfortunately, cookingupstories.com is taken by a woman named Lesley Marijke McCandless, where she keeps a blog about her life. So that was a no go. Also money was a restriction as well, I find I take for granted the free domains and hosting through Domain of One’s Own. Moving my website off of DoOO was interesting to see, and I’m not looking forward to real “adulting” where I have to pay for that. But anyway, for the time being, Cooking Up Stories will remain on dgst395.meredithhuffman.com.
As far as the risk and rewards go, I found that most of that was similar to how I ended up. I never really fell behind on the development of the site itself so I was able to comfortably finish the project. I plan to continue developing the site even after this project is over.
I think I stuck to my timeline pretty well. To be honest, I didn’t really pay attention to it once I started but it coincidentally meshed with the timeline. My first major deadline was opening up the site to user submitted content, and I think I even started that earlier than what the timeline says. Although I add a mobile development portion to it, that definitely didn’t need to be on the timeline.
Overall I think I was very successful with the project. I am definitely proud of my work, which is a major thing for me. I don’t turn in assignments if I don’t feel like I put in 110% of my effort into it. And with this project, I definitely want to put my name on it. I enjoyed creating this space from the ground up to what it is right now!