Not much to Report

Since I've already let you know all that's going on with the site... Thanksgiving was delicious and Tangled was an EXCELLENT movie; I highly recommend it. Oh, and Unstoppable was actually A LOT better than you would think it is judging from the trailer. :D

Cheers.

Alpha Testing

Well, things turned out pretty okay during alpha testing. Christie was nice enough to sacrifice her webspace for the time being so that we could test the site live on the web as opposed to simply being a local file on the hard drive. We wanted the real experience. Most things went without a hitch. I was most pleased that the jquery worked universally on both mac and pc.
DIV sizes need to be tweaked, as we want the site to NOT scroll when the viewer is at 1024x768. The site looks beautiful at 800x600, but when I look at it at a smaller resolution, I do 1024x768, because I see that as a minimum safe size for good resolution. Little things such as fixing the color of one of my links, and tweaking font sizes are among my chief concerns.
The two largest problems were found in Internet Explorer (because it's a garbage web browser). First off, the fonts refused to work on that. A solution to that is being explored at the moment. The biggest problem was in the form of some photos that simply would not show up in IE, the browser saying that the files did not exist while we were staring at them in firefox and on the mac. The problem ended up being in the color mode the pics were saved in. APPARENTLY, IE cannot handle CMYK photos. (I put this huge, so that you, my readers, who are more prone to glance than read, will know of this flaw.) Thanks to Phil's suggestion, I changed those to RGB, and BAM. All was fixed. As if nothing was ever wrong. STUPID BROWSER!

Anyhoo, home stretch! Can't wait for beta testing :)

Heading toward something tangible...

I'm probably going to encode another version of the site, with the other background. But for right now, here's what we have. Here's a sample of what we have.

Home Page

Menu opener

Menu page - Pasta and Pizza

Catering opener

Contact page

404

VOTE! (plz?)

Okay, so here's the thing kiddies. Angelica and I redid a photoshoot with a bunch of yummy foods. The effect we want is for food to hang over the cutting board and be able to make that it looks like its sitting on some sort of countertop. That wasn't practical with the original choice as the image was cropped, and most photos were like that. So, I experimented myself with the photoshop tool photomerge, using several photos from the shoot to try and expand the canvas a bit, and achieve the vision I had in mind. (Thank you Alexander Kusminov, for saving me hours of work).

However, We were better able to achieve the desired effect in the new shoot.
BUT! I'm not particularly ecstatic about the way it looks... A little too symmetrical and what not for my taste.
So, here, I'm holding it up to a vote to see what people think about the look. (Mentally envision the top one as the photomerge file).

(The white box represents the view of a 1024x768 window).

So, again, please vote which background has a generally better look please / would work better as a background.

WELLLL...

Right now, we're waiting to set up another meeting with our client to finalize our direction and discuss the changes and ideas we're having about the final designs. So, not much to report. We're in the middle of implementing all the advise and critiques everyone has provided us. Not much more to report since we're generally finalized in our designs.
Som in the mean time... I'll give you a taste of our 404 page! And here, you can see an example of Angelica's picture corrections, where she's taken out all of the slimy food glare. :)

Post-Proposal

So, after what I felt could have been a less rushed and "sucker punch"-ish proposal, we have A LOT to fix up. I will say that one of the things we WERE praised on was that we were the only group to actually have a coded site functional.
So, what I remember off the top of my head that we need to fix is that we need to solve the background issue. The window looks better when the entire image is shown. HOWEVER, having a smaller, less-zoomed background is tiling. So, we have to solve how to retain the image/look, while also making the same image viewable on all screens and making whatever the background of the background is look cohesive.
Another issue is the menus. We originally thought to put them in iframes. However, as the class pointed out, the scroll bar greatly detracts from the aesthetic of the site. Thus, we need to figure out how to fix that.
We need to come up with a contact page and code the 404 page.
Finally, we need to solve the logo issue. The owner gave us permission to break apart the logo to make it look better, but (as the class pointed out) this takes half of the restaurant's name out of the web logo. Thus, we need to fix that without compromising the logo itself by redesigning it as a whole.
If there was anything else I missed, feel free to post it in my comments. And I thank you all for your honest critiques.

Concept vs. Reality

You saw what our concept looked like. Now, here's the coded result. I've only coded the first page. But so far, so good :)

I have super awesome team mates.

Okay, so I won't lie. For a short period there, I started dreading coding. I was just thinking about how mundane it was going to turn out, but that anything I produced would be a better site than what they had before.
But then my group went back to Moscato's to take pictures of him making homemade pasta, other foods, and the location in general. We had come up with the concept that the background of the site would be a cutting board, but I never dreamed that it would be turn out this good -

We have Christie to thank for this super awesome layout. And with this, along with the fact that the owner has told us that we can alter the logo as we see fit in order to make it jive with the site best, I have become excited for coding all over again.