Web Development Reflective Essay

Roles and contributions

There were 3 members in our team. Me (Sudwipto), Markus and Vusi Mazibuko. But
unfortunately, we couldn’t establish any communication with Mazibuko. So, me and
Markus continued the project and divided the work in between us.

We divided the work in such way so that we can work on a specific part of the
project with the consent of everyone. We were two men, so we worked on almost
everything together.

For the part 1 of the project, Markus collected and gathered all the necessary data.
He initially exported the specifications and chose the theme of the park. I added my
observations and reviews of each theme park site later and marked the good and
bad aspects of each one. Markus and I both worked on what to add as main
attractions and facilities for the park visitors and recorded our conversations for
further implementation. We then decided a page layout. While we had different
ideas, we managed to merge it into one and finalize the layout. I proposed a
Website Skeleton Wireframe draft, Markus agreed with it, and we move on to the
next Part.

For the part 2 and 3, Markus built a basic HTML website with all the inputs of our
discussion from part 1. He did an amazing job on this and followed the wireframe. In
the meantime, I worked on stylesheet (CSS). I have applied styles to the HTML site
Markus built. I modified some of his codes on HTML to add better accessibility,
functionality and linking with CSS. Markus also proposed a style theme, but we
continued with my stylesheet.

For the final part 4, we worked together again to fix up the layout. I did most of the
coding for this part (including adding slideshows, animations, layout fixing, etc.), and
Markus managed the whole product and gathered all the assets and information.

We have uploaded our record of the conversation with the zip file of the main
project.

Your use of HTML and CSS

Basically, I worked on both HTML and CSS. As mentioned earlier, I almost wrote the
entire code of stylesheet and modified the HTML code which was provided by
Markus. So everything we represent on the site, I am able to use it well.
However, I believe I am not perfect and still more practice to be more effective. I
specially need to practice more with the interactive elements such as buttons, slides
etc. Also, animation is a huge part of a website. So, I need more time with it to be
able design great animations for my website. And I need to learn how to work with
prebuilt function and external libraries. There are a lot of good external libraries for
HTML and CSS. Knowing about them can help me to make a more interactive and
appealing website.
I guess I am particularly more powerful and useful at picking things up quickly. I am
more useful at linking HTMLs with JavaScript or CSS and make them work together. I
guess my skill is powerful in this area of styling. With the knowledge and help of
different prebuilt functions, external libraries and framework, I guess I can build a
website properly.

Positive aspects of your team work experience

To be honest, I am very satisfied with the experience I got from this team. My only
teammate was Markus who I got to work with. He is an amazing guy and was very
active. The thing I liked about him is, he is a very responsible person. He did his
share of works with great care and flawlessly. He was also very cooperative while
taking any decisions about the project. His part of code was well structured and I
could easily work on top his work because he wrote his codes (HTML part) in such
way so any person can easily identify what’s going on. It was easier for me to style
his HTML codes. What I understand from his code is, he got enough knowledge in
this area and his codes were elegant. Also, his file management skill was top notch.
He kept record of all of our discussions. It was a great pleasure doing work with
him.
From this teamwork I feel like it’s way easier to do anything together than it’s to do
alone. Throughout the course, we didn’t feel any rush and completed the project in
due to time with the team’s collaboration. Teamwork creates a more
comprehensive work than one/I could have produced. We share our different ideas
and combined those into one. I learnt a lot from this. I hope to work on more
project like this in such a team. Because while working together, your vision and
perspective gets broader.

Negative aspects of your team work experience

Everything has two sides. Just the same, this teamwork experience also has some
minor negative aspects. Firstly, the communication, we had to start working on the
project late because of this communication problem. Otherwise, we could have
done even better if we could get more time. Then, teammate changes, some of our
teammate changes during the course. We ended up in a team of 3 members at last.
And again, we couldn’t communicate with Vusi Mazibuko. So, it was just two of us.
And then again, the different time zone always delayed our response and
communications. I think this is the least enjoyable aspect of this experience.
Effects of team work on the quality of the work
My team contributed more than enough and I am truly happy with the experience.
We discussed together, worked together, decided together and we finalized the
project together. It was flawless from my point of view. It could be even better if we
could have established communications with Vusi or have one more active member.
But I guess that’s all we got. But I never felt insufficient from my point of view.
Markus contributed well, he did his part of job, I did mine. There’s no problem in the
team as we worked together and honored each other’s opinion. I guess, teamwork
makes any work better because everyone can judge it from different perspective
and provides feedback. And my team’s feedback, our project got better. We
changed a lot of things after discussing and that was only possible for the teamwork.
It definitely taught me how to collaborate with others and work on other’s work. It
also helped me write better and structured codes so that anyone can understand
my codes and also work on it. It builds up a compromising nature in one and
prepares one to adapt in any situation. Also, sometime you may overlook a bug, but
when you are in a team, the chance of happening it gets thinner.

Tools you and your team used

We took a lot of help from web. Every time we got stuck, we looked up for help on
the web and almost got the solution from somewhere. We got almost all the basic
references and working procedure from W3School. And We also used code
inspiration from them also. We didn’t use any external library for our website. We
implemented the image slideshow and got inspired to do it from Coding Snow
(YouTube). This channel helped us with the auto play and manual navigation
buttons. We built the project on Brackets and used HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We
could have used other libraries. The main reason we didn’t use any external library
because we wanted to built a website with what we have by default. We also could
have used prebuilt templates and edit those to make an awesome website. But we
wanted to work from the scratch and wanted to see how far we can go with the
knowledge we have gained. Prebuilt HTML+CSS has many advanced codes already
written as a template, we just had to change the content. We can keep the layout
most of times and it would be so efficient in terms of time and work load. Also with
external libraries, We can build a way better website. With all those tools, a website
would be more visually appealing, responsive and target-oriented. And also, we
could have used bootstrap, but in this case, we were not entirely familiar with that
front-end framework. We need to get acquainted with a library to make it work as
we want. So it’s essential to learn some necessary libraries and frameworks for
better productivity.