Hello. Well, this is my first ever blog post, so please be kind…
After 26 years as a graphic designer producing artwork for print at Shropshire Council, I was offered the hugely exciting opportunity to move into the Digital Services team in March 2013. This enabled me to extend my skills into understanding web design and to take a relative leap into the unknown world (for me at least) of front-end developing.
Over the past six or seven years, I have dabbled in my spare time on my own portfolio site initially, which was created in the dreaded Dreamweaver. I know, I know! Please don’t hold that against me. This then led to the creation of a few personal Wordpress sites which I built for friends - these have been great for helping me get to grips with a basic understanding of code. I'm not really a 'read the manual' type of girl, so I find that the best way to learn is always to just get in there and give it a go.
Joining Project WIP, although with slight trepidation at whether I would realistically be able to achieve what I wanted to in terms of learning to code, has been an absolute joy. Someone tweeted recently to say “@ProjectWIP is a fave of mine. All look so happy”, and it’s absolutely true. Project WIP is a fabulous team that I'm proud to be part of. We possibly eat far too much cake, but hey that can’t really be a bad thing. Can it?
The team itself is a very happy (possibly because of all that cake), sociable (have I mentioned that we go out socially rather a lot?), well-balanced group of hugely talented people with many varied skills, all of whom are willing to share their knowledge and answer my endless questions. We all have something different to offer, making us a multi-disciplined team (back-end and front-end developers, UX designers, copy-writers, content and social media editors...). We seamlessly combine that knowledge and advise on all aspects of the digital experience.
Anyway, here we have it…
...my first html page! Designed and coded from start to finish by little old me. I know it’s not particularly complicated in the grand scheme of things, but I’m ridiculously proud of it for all its simplicity. It’s fully responsive – that gave me a few headaches, but I got there in the end, and it’s now live and fulfilling the brief of the client.
Following on from my initiation into code, I was lucky enough to recently attend the 2013 Shropgeek (R)Evolution! event with some of the Project WIP team, which had some fabulous and inspiring speakers, and which has given me a huge incentive to want to learn and get involved in so much more. It really makes me feel that there are exciting times ahead.
Another significant aspect of my role is designing and producing eforms. There are still so many paper-only forms in use across Shropshire Council, which we are gradually converting into eforms.
As with everything, some of these are far more straightforward than others. Some have hugely complex formulas and conditions, while others may only need a few lines to simply gather a name and address. Preparation is key here: we work closely with the client throughout in order to ascertain exactly what the form needs to achieve, what information it needs to gather and what is absolutely necessary (and what isn't). We then process map it, build it and review continuously throughout the build process until we have a product that is fit for purpose.
They may not be the most exciting things in the world, but there is something of a challenge that comes from them that I relish (guilty pleasure time!). These are currently built using the i-casework system. However, this is in the process of being phased out over the next couple of years, and eventually all our eforms will be migrated to a modern, purpose-built CRM system.
Anyway, I really hope you’ve enjoyed finding out a little bit more about my role in our fabulous team. #goprojectwip
Jue