Craigs Portfolio

University

This is my portfolio work from University West of Scotland, these projects are website builds that can be showcased on a portfolio. Most of the work done through uni is offline work or different framework that I cant host (Linux hosting).

Internet Technologies

Built with LAMP tech stack, Bootstrap front-end, PHP & MariaDB back-end.

There was a couple of parts to this module, it consisted with learning about a technology as a group and showcasing a presentation. I got put with 2 nice randoms and we spoke about Angular for 10-15 minutes.  The second part was an online test. The third part is what is shown on this portfolio. We had to pick a technology stack and build a website for a conference subject. The project had to be responsive and allowed user registration/sign-in. We were given “Birds” conference but the idea was we build a template conference site that could have anything put into it and function for a company to use.

This was meant to be a 2 person group task for this project. The initial project we picked was MEAN stack. I was tasked with the backend and my partner was doing the frontend. I struggled heavily with learning how to use MongoDB. Finally got it working about a week before the deadline. The day before the deadline I found my partner never done any of the work and was just doing minimal paperwork. I scrapped the tech stack and defaulted to LAMP, grabbed bootstrap templates and stripped them together for parts I liked. I built a working templated website in approx 14 hours. The database work took me the longest, its far from being perfect but it got me quite a nice pass considering the time it took.

DWT - Dynamic Web Technology

Built with WordPress – Oxygen builder.

This was one of the most controversial but fun projects in uni. As this was the year covid and lockdowns hit, some projects fell through and were heavily changed. We were asked to develop and blog this project. It had 3 parts to it, the WordPress site needed to be a working e-commerce site. The website needed to contain API work but this could also be done offline. All work had to be documented within a blog.

 I love WordPress so I just had some fun and got to showcase an Oxygen build site. My site is a bit all over the place but that was the point. The jQuery part doesnt work properly, had issues with jQuery-UI within WordPress. The 6.0 update killed its functionality completely for some reason. The biggest part of this project was done offline and was CRUD functionality using any API.

The CRUD part of the project was the most frustrating, mainly the Update & Delete. It was the most challenging, mines during the class worked but not 100% correctly. It sometimes deleted or updated the most recently added post only.

Honours Project

Built with HTML, JS CSS – Code on Github.

My honours project was a question:
How do users prefer to upload media onto a server from a UX perspective?

I dont have a great deal to showcase for this project other than the forms on the links below, the project itself was a lot of theory using User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ). The form was gathered using Typeform which is no longer available. The purpose of the project was to measure if there was a preferred method of uploading data between drag n drop vs click and browse to upload media. To measure this, both pages were to be identical apart from the form type.

I struggled with this project and found it extremely frustrating, its pretty basic upload functionality but its mostly a theory based project and most content is within my Dissertation. 

The project relied heavily on testing which was really difficult to do during Covid at home. Form 2 (drag n drop) has limitations to only people with a pc as this type of form doesnt work with mobiles and tablets. Trying to get testing for this was difficult. Not to mention the wasted results that people just click aimlessly through. UEQ has a filter and I lost a major amount of results to this.

Overall, the outcome was that the drag n drop form looked better aesthetically but functionality there was not one that performs better than the other. They both scored the same for functionality which is what was expected.