As this design is still ongoing & has not been fully implemented yet, this review will have to cover the elements of what I have been doing in the process up to now.

 Apart from the time it has taken me to create my Portfolio, I think the process has all gone generally well.

 CDROM: In particular, the structure of the CDROM came together easily, ready for me to input my information. I had the layouts of the other websites that I had done & the different pages that I could use as templates, saving me a lot of time setting up the positioning of text & pictures on the pages. Getting this much done gave me a real sense of having started & was a good incentive for me to get on with the task.

 Mindmaps: The Mindmaps all came together really well & I enjoyed learning to use the new program. It certainly produced a different (but not necessarily better) end-product to drawing them by hand, but eliminated that frustrating possibility of running out of space on the paper. I certainly felt that it really contributed to the design process for me & I will be using it again.

 Client feedback: If I had any doubts about whether or not my ideas about getting the Diploma portfolio Best designs onto the WorkNet pages would be approved of, they were quickly dismissed. The feedback that I have received about my design to date from members of different client groups has been very positive.
 

 Technical issues: These were the main areas of difficulty in the process of producing the CDROM. Although I had become quite familiar with the software, there were new elements that I was aiming to incorporate on the CDROM & these posed new challenges for me to overcome. Getting the CDROM to autorun upon insertion into a drive turned out to be quite simple, although it took a visit to an online technical forum to find the easiest way of doing it.

 Embedding sound files into the pages wasn't well described in the software manual. I knew how to record them, but getting them to play from the page was another matter. In the end it seems as if I am relying upon the end user having the software to play my mp3 files. However, if they have the necessary sound card & speakers that they also need to hear them, then they will almost certainly have the software as well. I also wanted to be able to use an online questionnaire, where the reader just clicked a few boxes & emailed it back to me, but this again was not as simple as the manual suggested & my attempts just produced a blank email instead. At the time of accreditation this is still the case, but I hope to resolve this as soon as I can.

 Life Cycle Analysis: I was concerned that I wouldn't know enough about the statistics relating to the production of the different elements of the two portfolio formats. However, having carried out the Life Cycle Analysis exercise I realised that there were too many variables within the system to be able to do that accurately anyway & so a more general investigation was actually the most appropriate thing here.

 Element placement: This was something that I had difficulty with in a few designs, but is more relevant here because it concerns the placing of the different elements of the design process on seperate webpages (part of the CDROM design!). At first I put the OBREDIM Mindmap on the Final design page, but then realised that it didn't actually belong there, so what was I to put on the Final design page? As you can see, in the end I just created a new mindmap which combined together the relevant elements of the OBREDIM & CDROM mindmaps.
 

 I would allow myself a bit more time to write up my Portfolio & not give myself such a close target accreditation date so early on in my writing up process. The time constraint has motivated me to get on with the task, but at times I wasn't enjoying doing it very much. It seems that I once again underestimated the time it would take me to do a job; on this occasion completing my Portfolio.