Rapid Design Development

     So after being away from the project for a week, I was ready to jump right back in and help move things along further. While everyone else on the team managed to pump out their own original theme, I-- having missed a week-- unfortunately did not. But at this point, since my peers have made substantial progress, rather than continuing from my current standpoint, I decided to try my hand at jumping on someone else's idea and further enhance it. Taking this approach of depth over breadth turned out to be quite a good idea, as I was able to make just a few small changes and take it further to see what a closer-to-finished product would look like, for additional temperature checks. The result was positive, and this route definitely could be pursued further. Of course, other members of the team can take it from where I left off and enhance that even further, and this process can be repeated forever until a point of satisfaction is reached.

     If we ever get to a point where we can toss this theme file around and have all the team members add in their two cents very rapidly, I think that we'll have a pretty solid system of development here. It's quite exciting to be able to look at someone else's code-- which is a mildly modified version of familiar code--, make a few small changes, send it back, have others change it, and see the results stack onto each other. At this point, it's also easy enough to make rather large changes because of the structure and our familiarity with the structure. We know what to change and how to change them so that we don't spend an unreasonable amount of time figuring out how to do something. For example, I took a preexisting CSS theme file for our site and changed the background picture and the color scheme, so that we have a substantially different theme while keeping the rest of the features such as resizing of the background, the opacity, shadows, and bevels of other components, and many other features that had to be altered. Now it's only the custom, specific changes that need to be made to fit the theme itself. When someone makes a global change, we can share those changes and not waste time individually making those alterations, which I find very, very nice.

     But, what this means now is that I need to take this site to the next level-- in fact, to the next several levels. Because we can work fairly rapidly, that means that we aren't stuck on the same one or two issues for a week any more. So if I don't make major leaps in development and quickly, then I'll be left behind with nothing to do. I guess this weekend will be a good time to get inspired by stunning designs so that I can contribute some major implementations or perhaps start working on the responsive layout, because it seems like we are close to being able to work on the layout portion of this project!