A pretty big blow

I don't know about the rest of you, but to me Tom's announcement at the end of class was a pretty big blow. We've worked so hard on all of our stuff, and I've had a lot of questions going through my head in the past 24 hours. For example, I'm wondering if anything should have alerted us to the fact that Bright Tree wasn't really being honest with us about when they could get things done or the help that we had. We never saw anything besides outlines in our meetings, for example. I also was really bothered by the fact that they said they could get the development process done so quickly... it never seemed feasible but I didn't want to say anything because they are professionals. I also thought that we fielded some pretty weird questions in meetings - I guess from a web production standpoint, some of the things they were asking us weren't things I thought they would have to ask.

I'm not saying that I know better, or anything, just that looking back, a few things seem fishy.

I can't help but feel really bad for our designer, too. I was shocked by the size of the project they were given, and the project seemed like it required her to learn how to do a lot of html and related things before she could even start.

And of course, I feel terrible for everyone who has worked on this. It seems that we all got screwed by a company that may very well have been making big promises in an attempt to please and do a good job, but still failed us in the end. Half of us are graduating, and we're watching our semester project go down the drain.

With all of that off my chest, I move on to the questions:

Was it worthwhile?
Yeah, it was fun to make a site that was more issue-oriented. I liked being able to expand one subject so much and use different media to show it. It was almost more like a magazine, except that hard, immediate news will also be able to fit in on our site.

What, if anything, did you learn?
- Ask more questions when you use an outside company, and ask to see results
- We have to take a different look at content for the web, especially when it comes to how all of the stories fit together
- We also have to find a balance between hard news that we expect to regenerate, and featury things that have more shelf-life. When do we replace them, for example?

Would you do it again?
It depends. Not if it was on the side of doing advanced reporting.

What would you change?
See above. This needs to be a class on its own. It's hard for people with a print-only background to go in and make an awesome web site. I don't think most of us had any idea how long these things take when we started, or of a lot of the behind-the-scenes aspects of running a web site. Basically, I think that if this is in a class, the class time needs to be spent learning about web interfaces, usability, conceptualizing, and maybe even basic html so people have an idea of how things are done and how long it takes (and what can and can't be done) on a website. We need to know a lot more about the "how" before we make plans.

What would you keep?
I liked our team size, and I loved the class in general - it's a bunch of frickin' prodigies. Way to go, guys.

I would keep the way we eventually started getting things done (backout schedule, etc) and I'd keep the in-class brainstorming we had that's included both teams brainstorming for everything - voices from outside the group was a great benefit.