Dannygallegos's Blog

Internship Final Report

Chuck — Thu, 13 May 2010 01:43:49 +0000

Internship Final Report

I finished by internship at back40 design, and now it is time to wrap it up with my final report. I am going to talk about the greatest thing I achieved through out my stay there. I was given a project that I had to complete correctly and promptly and going into I had no Idea what I was really doing. I had to do a cut up of a comp and make it into a site. There were two to do and they gave me the harder of the two assuming that I was the better out of the interns. I wasn’t really sure why but of course I acted like I had been doing this all my life.

The comp was for Cadence in Edmond, it was a pretty complex lay out considering that I have never done one before. I couldn’t help but have this competitive spirit about me. I wanted to finish before Jessica. It wasn’t a race or anything but for some reason I wanted to win. I guess that comes from playing 4 sports in high school for all four years. Needless to say she finished hers pretty quick, but I will say that hers was a lot easier. I started mine in class that day and started figuring things out pretty quick but it still took me like 6 hours to finish. I think I ended up finishing it class. It was a lot a easier when you have two monitors. I was really proud of myself. It was nothing to back40, they do two of those a day, but I had a personal achievement that made me happy. So that was my greatest achievement I think. Well at least for myself. It is something I will use, especially if I plan on working for myself one day.

In conclusion interning there was a great decision, and I am thankful to have such a great teacher that pushed me to get it. With out that motivation I would have never even attempted to do get on there. So I am glad I did.

Monthly Professional Blog

Chuck — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:32:40 +0000

This month I will talk about free lancing. I have thought about it and I am slowly starting to think that is the only way to go. Since I had my first job at KFC when I was 16 I have hated having a boss. I have always wanted to call the shots. I am not a great leader but I do have ambition and I think I could manage a small amount of clients. The coolest thing about free lancing is if you get a solid foundation of clients then its all word of mouth from that point on. If things are good then you can get people under you. There are a lot of things I dont know, especially when it comes to designing. I like to consider myself a creator, not so much a maker. If that makes any since. I can code pretty much anything, but when I design something that I think is awesome, it turns out to not be so awesome. So I guess last night that I am going to try to get some cards and get out there and try to make some money on my own. I will say this has been the plan since I started my class. My goals before I even started was to have my own business. It can work! I intern for a successful free lancer in Dave Miller. Its going to take hard work and a lot of business cards! So if anyone knows a good place to get business cards then let me know!

Photoshop Tutorial

Chuck — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 19:38:53 +0000

Today I wrapped up my Photoshop tutorial from the Talk Mania site. Going through about 200 Lynda videos and half of a Photoshop Down and Dirty Tricks book, I have really sharpened my skills. My project was to take one of there designs and duplicate it. I picked a kind of challenging one to make myself that much sharper when I was finished. I am getting really good at utilizing layer panels and making everything extremely organized. Going through their design was tough at times trying to find the right brushes and matching their design exactly was also challenging. So I guess you could say that I took their design and made some of it my own.

The Down and Dirty Tricks book has been a life saver with any questions that I had. It is a lot more hands on and makes you really do it on your own giving you tips on the way. So when I was working on this project I was remembering all my short cuts, and when I ran into a problem it was easy to remember what to do. If I had known that I was going to have to slice this up and make a website out of it I may have picked a little easier design. So I guess I am not only going to make my Photoshop skills better I am also going to make my CSS skills better. I am always looking at the bright side of things! So here is the finished product. Hope everyone likes it and I am looking forward to some feed back!

Customer Service In Web Design

Chuck — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:14:33 +0000

When you are designing a web site for someone a lot goes into the entire process. Through my experiences at back 40 design I have come to learn that being prompt is one of the best things you can do to keep business booming. Work with the customer to get their design finished and then as soon as that is finished get it to development. Establishing a good relationship with your customers is also important, and I think you can do that just by being helpful and prompt. The majority of people you work with are going to have little understanding of how everything works. There will be questions and you have to be patient. Explain everything the best you can and walk the customer through what they need to do. If they have a problem on there site that is out of their control you have to fix that problem as fast as possible. So if I have learned anything about customer service I think being prompt is probably the best way of keeping people happy.

Database Development

Chuck — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:52:20 +0000

I started a course about 3 months ago in Database Development. To the naked eye you look at a table of data and just see information. To a developer they see lines of SQL. You cant imagine what really goes into organizing a simple table in a database. I have to go through two entire books to understand what is going on. I would have to say it isn’t the most interesting thing I have gone over, but it is defiantly helpful to know this stuff. A lot of sites today will work through a data base to store all the data in the site. Knowing how to move this data around and use it in your site is extremely important. Sites that are ran through a database run smoother and I can do a lot more with it. There is a complex code called PHP that you have use to communicate with a database. You make these separate sheets with the code it sends and receives the data from the database to the site.

Another thing I got to learn was Drupal. Being in a internship that uses a CMS, I was already kind of use to messing with them. Drupal is amazing. Plain and simple I love it. It makes things that would takes hours to do in to things that you can do in minutes. It runs through a database that it connects to automatically. Anything you put on to the Dupral site is loaded in the database automatically. It can hold user names, passwords and pretty much anything you can think of. You can download new themes and change anything on them with CSS. It uses PHP that you really dont even have to touch. Overall I am glad I stuck with it and finished the course and I am glad I learned something new that I will be able to use in the future.

Internship Journal

Chuck — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:14:20 +0000

After many attempts and missed opportunities I got an internship at Back40 Design. This stretch of email tag and opened and closed doors to try to get it to this spot has lasted for almost a year. Finally with a little help from Ms. Whitfield I got a hold of Stacy and got an interview. The interview went extremely smooth and I instantly felt comfortable with their questions and their personalities.

After a couple of days I sent in a follow-up letter thanking them for the interview and their time. That next week I received an email from Stacy saying I had the job! On my first day I sat down with Reyna going over a new in house CMS called Javelin. I knew from that point that this wasn’t going to be all that bad. Javelin is an awesome tool to simplify and speed up the process of applying content to pages. I have learned the process that page goes through, from the first meeting with the client to the final launch of the website. Javelin makes this process so much easier, giving the client the power to change their site anytime they would like.

Javelin uses something called modules. After the page is designed and made into a JPG, Scott will slice it up and apply a layout using some pretty lengthy CSS. After that point the developers will apply the modules to where they are supposed to be on the page. That’s where I have been coming in adding the right modules in the spots pre-marked for me. I take content that is given to us by the client and I insert it into the page. It can be a word document or an image, or a form. Pretty much anything you would think would be in a web site. They have a system and it worked like a well oiled machine.

Right now they have about 20 different sites they are working on and you would think that would be a lot but everything works so smooth that you would never really notice that you are busy. So for my first week I have learned a new CMS and I am getting really good at adding content to pages. I am looking forward to the up-coming weeks where I should be getting a lot more challenges.

Ajax Construction Kit

Chuck — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:23:06 +0000

So I just finished the Ajax Construction Kit text book. My three week journey has taught me a lot, like ajax is extremely hard to hand code! Ajax is also very important and very useful. Many sites are using more and more ajax functions. Yahoo and Google to name two big ones. The idea of Ajax is to change data on a page with have to load a whole new page. So if you click on something on the page, it will change but the URL will remain the same. Google maps is a big one that people use. You can zoom and move from place to place and you dont have to go to a different page every time you want to look at a new location. They have aslo implied a the drop down text bar in the search field. The predictive bar that can “read your mind” is all ajax. It uses a massive XML file that has all the data on it that should know what you are typing or what your about to to type. So in conclusion ajax is pretty cool tool in the web industry. Its not always necessary but it is very useful.

Is thier anyone out there?

Chuck — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:08:39 +0000

So set up a blog account, and I prefer the word blurb over blog. Anyway even when I tweet my link and facebook my 300+ friend list… I get nothing. Im working extra hard on sharing my ideas to the world and no one is listening! Its all good, I can use this as a journal. I can use this as something to get my mind off things by putting it on a computer screen. Thats it for today. Thank you

Blogging???

Chuck — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:51:03 +0000

Haha it took long enough for me to get word press and start blogging. I guess we get credit for sharing our thoughts. So I guess I will be linking this blog site to my other sites for all to see. As of right now I am really sick and I want to go home. I thought about pulling an all day in class but I think im going to have to just go home and sleep. I feel awful today, and I am taking a lot of meds right now and I am really having trouble focusing. So hopefully I can get the hang of this word press thing and start making some awesome blogs in the future. later!