Assignment 3

Welcome to your final assignment!

Step 1 (Assignment 3.1)

Find another classmate. Have them peer-review your wordpress site. Also, have someone find you, and peer-review their wordpress site!

What do I mean peer review?

Put all the URLs of all your site's pages in a spreadsheet. Give that spreadsheet to your classmate.

When you receive a spreadsheet, here's a checklist of things to look for:

• Basic accessibility stuff: for example, do all the images have appropriate alternative text?
• Basic automated audit stuff: are there performance metrics in Lighthouse that could be improved?
• Basic responsive stuff: does anything break on mobile? Tablet? At a specific breakpoint?
• Basic colour stuff: is there a coherent colour scheme? Are there any "oddball" colours?
• Basic design pattern stuff: are things where you expect them to be? Are there useful things that are missing? (Remember your design conventions).
• Basic quality assurance stuff: do all the buttons and links do something/link to somewhere? Is there any content - either text or images - that doesn't belong?
• Basic optimization stuff: are there images that could be resized or compressed? Are there images or video in the wrong format?
• Aesthetic feedback. Okay, this one's tricky: make sure any aesthetic feedback is not negative and is not vague. In other words, don't say, "I don't like it, it sucks, overall". Instead, give actionable suggestions for things you might prefer. "I feel like you can align more closely to the layout grid" is a totally office-friendly way of saying, "it looks messy".

But every blog post and portfolio project gets its own URL! That's too many pages! That's true. You can pick one blog post or portfolio page and review that one, rather than all of them. Since they share a template, most of your feedback will be helpful for all those URLs.

Step 2 (Assignment 3.1)

Give your classmate their feedback before or on...

You'll also submit this via Blackboard at the same time.

It's very important that you hand this off by the deadline, and failure to do so will be heavily reflected in your marks.

Once you have your feedback, take the following week to make as many improvements as you can based on the peer review. Remember: do easy stuff first and do stuff people notice first. The hard/imperceptible stuff... well frankly you don't need to do it at all, not on this website, not if you don't feel like it.

Step 3 (Assignment 3.2)

In our final class, you'll talk to the class about your Wordpress site. Plan to talk for about 4 minutes. Definitely do a dry-run beforehand, and time yourself - since we have limited time, and a lot of folks, I can't let you go too far over time. On blackboard, submit the URL of your site, along with any presentation materials (for example, a PowerPoint deck) you use.

Here's some stuff to talk about:

• Here's my website, look at it
• Why I made this website, and not a different website
• What feedback I got from the peer review
• What I fixed based on the peer review
• What in the peer review I didn't want to do

Presentations are hard. You can't improvise anything of substance without coming off as kinda rude. Start by thinking about what kind of presentation you'd like to see, and then try to do that.

Don't criticize the feedback you were given. It's extremely tacky, and not interesting to anyone. If you're given peer feedback you don't agree with, or that isn't helpful, ignore it and focus on the stuff that you are confident will make your site better.

And, if you want my opinion, good presentations aren't about showing off, or being funny or smart. They're about sharing the things that made you excited, or curious, or frustrated, or the things that made you laugh. If you present from a place of generously sharing your honest experience, you'll almost certainly do a good job.

Step 4 (Assignment 3.2)

Kick back and await your grade!

If you're curious, this is what you're getting graded on:

• Did you turn over your peer review on the day it was due? Up to 4 points
• Was your peer review thorough? Up to 4 points
• Did you make changes on your website based on the peer review? Up to 6 points
• Was your presentation well-prepared? Up to 6 points