Summarize the Evolution of Your Capstone
Looking back on capstone, it has been quite the journey. The adventure began towards the end of NMD 306, when we began brainstorming ideas. In that moment we were intimidated by the capstone process and were eager to come up with a solid idea. As New Media majors, we wanted to design and implement a project that is new, exciting and innovative. At first, we had a vision to create a Study Abroad app or website that would assist students that are traveling in Europe. After brainstorming and designing a potential travel app, we realized that it would be difficult to test the app in Orono because not many students study abroad. We also wanted to create a project that benefits majority of students on campus. After that idea quickly failed and went down hill, we were forced to come up with a new one. We then started to consider different ideas and possibilities for our capstone project. We took the time to think about the issues students have over the course of the college experience here at UMaine. We both simultaneously agreed that housing was one of the major difficulties student’s deal with year after year and we knew a more reliable resources is what was needed.
After weeks of brainstorming different ideas, the development for Livin’ Easy began mid September 2014. Once we had a mutual goal in mind, we started to think about things we disliked about Orono or issues we had on and off campus. One day we were browsing through airbnb’s website and thought about how Orono’s community and students would benefit from a housing website that could connect all of the current resources into one. Throughout our college experience, we have had countless issues when searching for off-campus housing within an affordable budget. The issues we have experienced deal with the fact that there are no efficient housing websites for students in Orono that stay maintained or up to date. The housing websites that do exist are poorly designed and are not effective in assisting students with locating housing. After years of dealing with these issues and talking with dozens of students, we have found that everyone agrees students lack a single platform or website that would allow them to search a single database that contains all of the listings in our local area. After a few years of dealings with these issues, we decided that the Orono community could really benefit from a quick, convenient housing website. Throughout our capstone, we have experienced both moments of struggle and moments of success. Livin Easy has come a long way in the past 8 months, and ultimately we are satisfied with its outcome.
For our capstone specifically, promotion and advertising was a huge part. One large issue that we ran into during the promotion phase was advertising in the freshmen dorms. We set up a meeting with the head of Residence Life on campus and pitched our capstone project, requesting to use advertise in the freshmen dorms. Although he loved everything about our project, he said that it was competing with the school and their intention of keeping students on campus. At first this was quite the barrier put up in front of us as we figured a large part of our target audience would be students looking to leave campus, so most likely freshman. Although we were disappointed and somewhat frustrated with the news we received, we accepted it and worked worked around the problem and figured out another solution. Our solution was simple yet effective. We created short surveys that we asked freshmen/sophomore students to take. Some people filled out the survey when they visited our advertising stand, and others filled it out online on their own time. We also encouraged our friends and neighbors to take our survey and also test it out for themselves. We were very satisfied how people responded to the questions we had. There were both positive comments and negative comments, that all equally contributed to our overall website.
Although we weren’t allowed to advertise in the freshmen dorms, we took advantage of advertising in the Union. The Union was the perfect place to advertise because there were plenty of students and faculty walking across passing our stand. We set up our project at a large table across from the bookstore. We displayed our large information poster and promotion video so students can get a better idea about our website. In addition, we created a survey that we made available for students to take. The feedback was extremely helpful for our progression on our capstone. Most of the feedback was directed towards adjusting the price slider, adding reviews from students and adding more apartment listings. The biggest criticism we had was that students wanted to see reviews of previous places so they know if the previous owner had a pleasant experience.
As a team, we are happy that we were able to create a fun and accessible website that students can really benefit from. The feedback that we gathered from our capstone was extremely beneficial in the process of adding and adjusting our website. Since our website is almost entirely directed towards students, we really valued their opinions and contributions to our website. Capstone has definitely taught us to push through our problems and figure out solutions, no matter how difficult the situation is. Below is a flowchart we created in the beginning of Fall 2014 that shows our steps in the overall process of creating our website.
Access your capstones successes and failure
Throughout our capstone, we have experienced both moments of struggle and moments of success. Livin Easy has come a long way in the past 8 months, and ultimately we are satisfied with its outcome. As a team, we have learned and progressed from our own mistakes and failures. After struggling with the early development stages and learning how to code our own website, we soon learned that capstone is a huge challenge. A huge and very underestimated part of the capstone process is first coming up with an idea. From the beginning, we knew that we wanted to create a website or app that benefited students, however, it took a lot of time and thinking to come up with a solid capstone idea.
Coding was a huge struggle for us early on. During the beginning stages of developing our website, we experimented with HTML and JSON to create a working homepage that functioned with basic styling. We were not happy with the outcome of our first layout. After experiencing failure, we tried a different approach and designed a new and more detailed home page for our website using HTML PHP and MySQL. Although the page we created worked and functioned the way we wanted to but we started running into issues solving coding problems. We also ran into a problem where our homepage took a while to load and also enter in information. After two months of coding and designing ourselves, we realized that we needed to take a different approach to creating the website. Our professor Joline, suggested that check out WordPress and see if that could be an option. After watching tutorials and asking Joline a lot of questions, we were able to start building a solid website that has the look and functions that we wanted to see. From the start we had a vision in mind for our housing website. We wanted our housing website to be fun and upbeat, with bright colors, pictures and visuals and a parallax scroll. Although WordPress allowed us to be creative and upload content we designed, it didn’t always work the way we wanted it to. We ran into issues and problems when getting our home page slider to work and function and we had issues adjusting the price slider on the home page.
Feedback was definitely a huge contribution to our project. Student’s opinions, suggestions and contributions significantly changed our project for the better and this type of feedback is what will always keep the site changing to fit the needs of its users. Faculty member’s help was also a huge contribution to our project. Although student’s opinions are important, New Media faculty members gave us constructive criticism and suggestions as to how we can make our project more powerful and effective. Another issue we ran into was getting in touch with landlords. Although we were in frequent contact with Chad Bradbury from KC Management other landlords, Dennis Cross from Cross Properties did not respond to emails as often. Chad Bradbury provided us with the most apartment listings on our site and he told us that there are more listings to come in the next few weeks. We were very pleased that almost all of the landlords in the area want to jump on board with Livin’ Easy as it would be free promoting for them. As New Media students, our goal was to create a capstone project that creates a unique and futuristic experience for our users. We had to make mistakes and fail in order to succeed with this capstone project. In the beginning we struggled and in the end we struggled, but with each problem we learned something from it. Overall, we felt that our capstone was an experience where we were able to apply our New Media skills to something we are passionate about and we have built something that we can continue to grow and expand as the future goes on.
Annotated Bibliography
http://www.zillow.com/ –Zillow Group is an online real estate database company
http://www.bluehost.com/ – Blue host is the web hosting site that we purchased to host our website
First Class (Apartment Folder)
