Friday 24th April
Well that's another day of placement done and out of the way. Today I'd planned on getting a few things done with regards to the website, primarily the following:
- Add photos to gallery sections for deals added recently
- Get the flights deal and category sections updated with the new look
I also had to get a flyer ready for print submission done for the end of the day. I'd like to say that I got a chance to look at the web related stuff, I really would. However, that would be a lie.
What ended up happening was that I spent the day wrestling with InDesign to try and get it to do the things that I wanted it to do in a way that would look nice once printed. I'm not going to fault the software, more that it's a fault with my preference for coding. I'm just not used to the whole WYSIWIG side of software and have always leaned more towards media to be placed on the web.
I finally got the thing finished up about 20 minutes before my day ended. Hardly the most productive day ever...
Posted by Wulf on April 24, 2009, 7:11 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
Wednesday April 22nd
Today was a bit of a strange day. Things started off painfully slowly and continued that way for most of the day. I spent the vast majority of my day finding images to fill out the image galleries for vacations on the website. The highlight of the first half of the day was the BT Engineer coming in and sorting out the phones.
That all changed towards the end of the day when it seemed that the entire office needed me to do things. Sorting out eflyers, putting deals onto the site, fixing problems in the code of the Thriftway Travel site. Some of them were entirely my fault, failing to code flash to play nice with Internet Explorer for example, but others are things that are completly beyond my control to fix, such as how Internet Explorer renders things when you zoom in or out of the page.
I also had to send out an eflyer to Thriftway Consol's mailing list, and have set one up for sending tomorrow. When I get in on Friday I will be sorting another and preparing 2 flyers for print.
In tech tomorrow for presentations.
Posted by Wulf on April 22, 2009, 8:14 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
Tuesday April 21st
Today I spent continuing the work on the Thriftway Site. Had a few deals to put on at the start of the day and then it was straight into the coding. Both the Cruises and Package Deals sections have their individual post designs implemented. Unfortunately I haven't been able to implement the design into either the Flights or the Category areas. This is due to a complete lack of any Flight deals on the site for me to test things with to ensure that they're working.
I also got the opportunity of dealing with a technician/engineer from BT today. The phone system in the offices has been acting up since Thursday and, after trying everything we could, we've had to get someone with an idea out to look at things. He took a look at the system and will probably be getting back to me tomorrow.
Posted by Wulf on April 21, 2009, 7:02 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
Monday April 20th
The plan of attack for today was to get the look of the site shifted over from the original design Will had produced over to the newer design that he has since developed for the Individual Deals and the Categories page. I mentioned this previously, providing a mockup in my April 15th blog post.
I did manage to start the work on this, modifying the overall design of the site to allow for the implementation of the actual switch. I'm a bit hesitant of how the new look has impacted the front page, and may adapt it to allow the first column to be slightly larger. You can see before and after shots by clicking here (before) and here (after).
I also managed to start rolling out the new design of the single posts, to the cruises section. You can see the before and after of those here (cruise before) and here (cruise after).
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take things any further than this as I was soon tasked with adding new content to the site. Whilst it's important that deals are contantly updated, the site is currently a mix of different layouts, and looks rather horrible for it.
Posted by Wulf on April 20, 2009, 7:43 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
Friday April 17th
I spent Friday working on the code behind the new Category and Single Post pages. As yet I haven't managed to get it into the site. I also got to test Thriftway's online search/booking system. It works well though I did encounter a problem. Upon trying to book a low-cost flight, in this case with Easyjet, the credit card we were using failed to autheticate. Not exactly that great when it comes to customer satisfaction.
This resulted in me spending what felt like an hour on the phone with the company TelMe, who manage the flight search/booking system that we use. The person I spoke with was most useful, and between the pair of us we managed to identify that the bug did not affect the majority of the bookings system, but was a fault somewhere in the low-cost bookings, and could have simply been that the card was declined or temporarily blocked for some reason. The person I was dealing with said he'd look into the issue and get back to us.
Posted by Wulf on April 20, 2009, 9:48 am with 0 comments - Permalink
