Thomas Edison invented a way of playing music similar to a record on a record player. They are called cylinders. This project’s goal is to design and develop a website for the Utah Valley Universities Audio Department that allows people to listen to cylinders, donate their own cylinders, and learn more about the documentation efforts. We also needed to create a hand off document that allows those who work on this project in the future, understand design decisions, learn how the site was developed, and empower them to easily pick up the project and run with it.
Goals: ​
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Work with a development student to Design and Develop a Website for the Audio Department at Utah Valley University.
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Create a Document that helps future students understand what we did to help them continue the project after the semester is over.
Audience: ​
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Audio Department Students and older people.
Starting the Project
At the beginning of a semester, I was assigned to work with one other student to help design and develop a website for the Utah Valley University Audio Department. They had a project they had been doing which involved recording and remastering music originally recorded on Cylinders that Thomas Edison invented. The website that they were using to upload the information was very outdated and was not working correctly, so they asked for help from the Web Design and Development Department to help create a new one. At first it took a few weeks to get the project started since we had some trouble getting in contact with our stakeholders, but once we finished up it was easy to start designing.
Wireframes
About 80% of the semester was doing research! First thing I started to do was put together some wireframes. I was struggling to make these wireframes simple as I was getting a bit too excited to see the final designs. This really made this process was harder than it should have been. I finally got the final product made though and immediately started on putting color into the designs! I had never made a design in such a short time frame as we also had to develop the website all while being limited in the time we were able to spend on the project during the week. We were only able to spend 6 hours total weekly on the project including our class time so I was nervous we wouldn't get the work done.
Results
Once the designs were done the website was coded very quickly! None of the process took as long as I thought it did and by the end of the semester, I wished that I spent more time doing research at the beginning. I really thought that the design and development process would take a lot longer. If I learned anything from this website, it would be the fact that I should have taken more time at the beginning looking into what other music platforms do and studying what people liked and hated about them. Then our project would have been even better than it was! We were successful though! We created a great website and developed the whole front end so that the Audio Department can continue their mission of sharing more cylinders with more people and preserving more of history.