Below are just some failsafes should anything go wrong.
I have attached link to a full runthrough of myself using the site, showing that every thing works as intended.
I have also attached my pdf.
Failsafe, Final Runthrough/PDF
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All of the above assets were created using adobe illustrator by me. Some of the images were taken from unsplash.com and are all royalty free. The two below images were taken from Thinkstock.com and I have paid for the rights to use them.
The Learning Curve
/First coming into Adobe Muse with very little experience I thought it would be difficult. Difficult was an understatement. The amount of frustration caused by stupid little bugs and glitches was endless. One thing Adobe have always done well is their interfaces, any photoshop user can go into illustrator, indesign or after effects and things look similar. This is the same with muse, which is commendable, as it made the introduction a little easier. That being said things didn’t really improve from here on out. Being able to use third party widgets seems like an amazing thing, having the community create things that will make your life easier, on paper this sounds fantastic but in practice the more third party widgets the greater the chance of incompatibility, with pop ups reacting with the moving content widgets and the anchor scroll widget reacting with the youtube gallery widget it is a minefield of accidents waiting to happen, the worst thing is that something will work fine and two seconds later it won’t, with no logical explanation or error message. Things can look perfect in the edit window and once you have a live preview they look awful and theres near enough no way of telling why without simply undoing and retracing all your steps.
All of this being said Muse is a fantastic piece of software and for me, someone who knows next to nothing about web design, to be able to take on this sort of project and complete it to a standard that I’m happy with is amazing to me.
Use of Widgets
/Third party widgets have been crucial in the development of my site. From simple scroll disablers to things like the pop up creator which has become fundamental to my site. In total I have used 8 widgets, 2 of these being adobe widgets; Composition and Contact Forms. The other 4 were all found via adobe’s muse resources. I have listed them below with links to them:
Anchor Scroll – https://musewidgets.com/products/anchor-scroll
YouTube Gallery – https://musewidgets.com/products/youtube-gallery-widget
Moveable Content – https://musewidgets.com/products/moveable-content
MoveFeatures – https://musewidgets.com/products/move-features
Animated Preloaders – https://musewidgets.com/products/animated-page-preloaders
Publishing the site
/To publish the site to my domain I needed to upgrade my GoDaddy account to a cPanel FTP enabled plan. From here I was then able to simply upload my site to my domain using Muse’s built in “Upload to FTP Host” menu option.
One thing I immediately noticed when testing the site was that the contact form didn’t work. I believe this was because I had it set to ping emails to my icloud address. When the form only works with email address’s from the sites they are hosted. The fix for this was really simple, as all I had to do was set up my harrisonwatson.uk email, and have it forward to my icloud address.
The site can be viewed at: www.harrisonwatson.uk