The 2015 Spring semester for my Advanced Web Design class at SNHU has come to a close. For the final exam, the students presented their website project to the client, Girls at Work, Inc. The students went through a four phase process; Research, Creative, Development and Debug. Every class doesn’t always make it to the Responsive Debugging phase. I was very impressed and proud of how many students took their web projects to the next level this semester. There were some full width layouts, and many that had a focus on usability and functionality.
As Graphic Design Majors, they all struggle with code at the beginning. They look at code as something far fetched and alien. They go through frustrations and some even throw the towel half way. Those that stick around experience an ah-HA! moment. You start seeing the progress. While time goes by, you witness the birth of a new behavior, which was definitely present this semester. The behavior is one of accomplishment and pride of writing code and understanding it. Of course there is so much more to learn about web development and design, but to see the mind barrier in a student collapse was, simply put… awesome. The conversations that started with “I can’t” at the beginning of the semester turned into “I can.”
The highlight of the semester was when a few students told me they applied for a job that required designing, building and/or managing a website built on WordPress. The joy of watching them wrap up the semester with the confidence to take on that job was more than I could ever ask for.
Here are the top four websites designed and built on a custom WordPress child theme by the Advance Web Design class of Spring 2015. The top four were chosen by their client Girls at Work, Inc.
Bank Phromratanapongse
Alex Talbot
Joe Huskey
Team PVRIS – Cody Favata & Matt Ryan