Today is the first day that I started designing the front end of my team’s animal shelter website. I met with my group last week and we talked online for a couple of hours about all the features our site should have.  Our goal is to create a responsive webpage that works on desktops, tablets, and mobile. The site will match shelter animals up with prospective owners.

This project seems daunting, as the three of us must cooperate to design the front end and connect it to the back end. Fortunately, we are all thrilled to work on this project together. So far, we do not predict any problems working on these tasks as a team. We are using Jira to keep up to date with all the different tasks that we need to finish.

Since I am working on the front end, I am trying to make sure I design the landing page well, as I believe it is the most critical page since clients will see it first. That said, I am mostly concerned with the matchmaking page as the animations must be fluid for the user to not get bored when trying to find animals to adopt.

To overcome these difficult tasks, I am spending the first week designing the layouts of most of the pages and getting feedback from my peers. After we discuss how everything looks, we will then decide as a team exactly how we want the animations to look. It is imperative that the matchmaking feature follows UX/UI standards to keep the user interested.

I have never been much of a designer, but I have been interested in using React to create a large project and I believe this is my opportunity to learn and grow as a developer and designer. I can’t wait to see how this project evolves over time. For now, it’s time to get back to work. I still have a few more pages to design before our next meeting!