Category Archives: 2013 Summer class

Capricia Alston

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My vision for my website is still to create an online portfolio. I want it to include the work that I’ve done while in this program, as well as clearly display that I know how to design a website. In order for me to show the latter, I’m hoping to make drastic changes to a common theme page and make it my own. Along with this class, I’m taking Reporting in the Field, so by the end of the semester I will have tons of pictures I’ll want to share on my site. I plan to have a gallery on there from the trip we take as well as a section of my video clips.

I plan for my focus to mainly be on the development rather than the design/look because I’ll be taking web design next semester and will continue to add to my site the more I learn. However, I do want to be able to show that I know how to create an interactive site, so I’ll definitely have buttons and a couple of other designs that need to be clicked or hovered over in order to function. If I leave this class with a site that is clearly mine, displays quality work and requires a few clicks here and there, then I will be completely satisfied with the progress that I’ve made.

UPDATE POST:

URL: capricia.alston@gmail.com

 

UPDATE POST:

URL: capricia.alston@gmail.com

Description: My site will include any and all work that I’ve done or have been involved with while in this program.

Goals:

  • Have something beyond a resume for employers to have access to
  • Prove that I am capable of managing and troubleshooting a website
  • Finally have one place that all of my recent work is stored
  • Make a site that I’m proud of
  • Eventually this transitions to a site that attracts sports enthusiasts as well

Audience:

My primary audience will be employers or people curious about me and my work. Hopefully I will be able to expand that to sports enthusiasts also. This expansion will only occur once I have the basics of my site and how it works understood.

Conceptual Level:

  • I will have a gallery of pictures I’ve taken, focused around the New Mexico trip I’ll be taking in three weeks
  • The option to view my resume will be one of the header options on my page
  • An About Me page
  • I will have a section of videos I’ve edited or done stand-up
  • Eventually I will have a blog section as well which will be centered around sports

Theme:

Custom Community – http://wordpress.org/themes/custom-community

Modifications:

  • I will definitely be changing the entire color scheme and designs at the top of the page. Still debating if I want the top of the page to be a photo
  • I want to make the pictures on the side expand when the mouse is hovering over it.
  • Find an appropriate place to import my Twitter posts

Jennings Final Project Pitch

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I have changed gears for my final project idea. I wanted to do something with video editing, but now I am thinking that is a bit too specialized and more work than I expect to be able to complete in a semester. I still would like to fiddle with it once I get better with the languages, but not for now.

I am looking to build a blog site for sports that can be customized. I think of it as a portfolio of sorts for me, as I ultimately want to write about sports and I think I could customize it to have some cool interactivity on it. I envision adding a section that aggregates tweets that reference the blog or certain sporting events (like the Stanley Cup Finals currently) on a rolling ticker on the right, and then content and allowing for video and pictures to be uploaded directly by me or other admins.

I want to keep the content to small chunks on the main page, with a “read more…” link similar to what WordPress already does, and make it so that the front page always keeps some pictures and videos static in place (not necessarily the same pic or video, but the same place on the page) to ensure that the page is visually appealing on first view.

So that is where I am starting from, with changes to be made at irregular intervals according to the whims of Greg, me, or the gremlins in the code.

Milagro Cleaning

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I purchased the domain www.milagrocleaning.com for my family’s home cleaning business. My mother has created a really great business starting from one home to now having a list of over 50 homes in the Northern Virginia area through word of mouth. Her clients over the past twenty years have included former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and current CNN corespondent Wolf Blitzer. With a booming housing market, sellers have finally started to see a return on their investment by selling their homes. Unfortunately, this has created a higher than average customer attrition for my family’s business. With references and word of mouth tapping out, we’re turning to the online space to gain customers and fill the gaps in the schedule.

This website should meet two goals; It should create more clients for my family’s business, and it should create an online revenue stream to pay off the cost of building it and having it hosted. The websites audience should be home owners that are looking for professional home cleaning services in the Northern Virginia area. There are specific areas in Northern Virginia that we would like to target over others, like Arlington and Alexandria as opposed to Sterling, Fairfax, and Burke. I look at the project as another one of my personal clients, and a source of revenue by creating a website that has the space to either sell affiliate products through a shop page or selling sponsored blog posts. The website should have a responsive and clean design that showcases great looking houses visually. I hope to use the skills I have learned in this web development course to show off and grow my family’s business.

URL: www.milagrocleaning.com

Description: A website that will provide an alternative to big brand chain home cleaning companies.

Goals:

  • Create a website that coverts traffic into leads (Receive calls for home cleaning estimates)
  • Design that illustrates clean lines and is responsive to mobile
  • Site that incorporates visual assets to create self made reputation
  • Encourage content creation and addition by admin users.

Audience: The website should attract web traffic from Northern, Virginia home owners interested in home cleaning service.

Measurement:

  • Internal linking structure that guides users to a contact form page.
  • A bright website that has clean lines throughout and looks equally as attractive on mobile and tablet as it does on desktop.
  • Use social network APIs to integrate visual assets into the website (Flickr/Instagram)
  • Create custom boxes/inputs in “Portfolio” post type to facilitate addition of content

Theme: BigBang

Draft List:

  • Create a custom input box in the “Portfolio” post type
  • Slow down main page rotator to increase the time an image is displayed to a user
  • Add sharing functionality to pages to encourage content virility
  • Create custom form to grab necessary information
  • Effectively use categories and tags to create hierarchal structure
  • Change colors throughout as necessary to coincide with already established logo/brand
  • Edit as I see fit

Final Project Pitch

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I plan to create a personal photography portfolio for my final project. The portfolio will be displayed in a user-friendly and simply-designed website, and will target those interested in reviewing my capabilities as a photographer – namely prospective employers. Ideally, the site would be easily converted from a portfolio to a marketplace where I could sell my work. This will allow me to turn my portfolio into a for-profit site if it appears there is a profit to be gained.

I currently display my photos in a photoblog titled “RobLSnyder.” That photoblog is hosted on Tumblr and I track the blog’s performance using Google Analytics. The blog hasn’t done so poorly. However, the photos cannot be organized well and that limits how much of my work can be seen at any given time. With a platform like WordPress, I think I could bring a bit more organization and draw more attention to my best work. I think I could also create themed areas, and promote those themes when I think it is most beneficial (firework-related photos during Fourth of July, for example).

I don’t anticipate adding much to the theme that I choose, since I will be looking for a very basic and clean display. What I will likely change is the functionality of the theme, and perhaps even remove a few things. That remains to be seen.

URL:  www.RobLSnyder.com

Description:  A personal photography portfolio that spans over a decade and across the globe.

Goals:  

  • To display my work in a well organized and visually appealing manner.
  • To create a foundation from which I can eventually sell some of my work.
  • To have a functional site to which I can continue to add new photographs.

Audience:  People who enjoy browsing photographs, and are perhaps interested in purchasing original photographs of a location of interest.

How I Will Achieve My Goal:

  • Transfer all photographs from Tumblr to RobLSnyder.com.
  • Experiment with ways to organize the photographs and choose a method.
  • Organize the photographs and create a way to update each section with new shots.
  • Create a way for viewers to purchase photographs (perhaps just contact information to begin with).
  • I plan to use Twenty Eleven Theme (http://wordpress.org/themes/twentyeleven).

Functionality:

  • The site should be organized in clear sections that viewers can access easily, so there should be clear and understandable hyperlinks.
  • Viewers shouldn’t have to browse through a bunch of photos in sequence. They should have a broad view and a close view, and be able to move between the two quickly.
  • If they like a photo, there should be a way for them to save that for access later.
  • I should be able to quickly add photos, preferably from multiple platforms.
  • Design should be neat and free of clutter or distractions.
  • The display of the photographs should be as artistic as the photographs themselves.

Theme Modifications:

  • I’ll attempt to make the TwentyEleven theme less rigid, and perhaps more dynamic in the way photographs are displayed and how they link to other pages. For example, I will try to modify the them to move photographs from the left side of the page, so various places around the page. I’ll see if I can do this without messing up the other widgets, text, etc.
  • I’d also like to see if I can create an introduction video (or quick presentation) to my site. In other words, when one clicks on the link, a quick sound and image will display in an Adobe Flash-like presentation. I’ve seen this on similar sites, and I think it works well.
  • It would be nice to know which photographs are being looked at the most, get the most unique visits, and are viewed for the longest period of time. I’d also like to insert some kind of protection from obtaining full-resolution photos from the site. I’m not sure if this is already built into the TwentyEleven theme or not.

High On Endorphins: Doing it Right This Time

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A few years ago, a couple of people on the Georgetown track team and I started a blog called High On Endorphins, where we would post videos and little articles about running and our comical viewpoints on the sport. Usually we would get really into it for about a week and actually post something, then it would go dormant for a year and a half. The site I want to build would be a revival of this basic idea, mostly comical commentary loosely centered around endurance sports (Without any actual rules. If I want to comment on Miley Cyrus’s latest music video, I’m going to do that too).

In the past the site was a tumblr, this time I want it to be more functional.  Mostly, I want the design to look professional, and I think using CSS and PHP will help me make the site look better than it ever has. I want to have different pages, not just posts, and for those pages to have different functionalities. I want to be able to offer readers ways to vote on certain things in my posts and share their opinions in ways beyond commenting, and have pages that have results of those interactions. I want to be able to post with interactive galleries and polls. Mostly, I want the site to be so good that I won’t want to leave it dormant again, so that it encourages me to post more prolifically.

 

Update to my idea:

URL: highonendorphins.com

Description: a collection of my most interesting/funny/angry thoughts on exercise, endurance sports, sports in general, pop culture, and anything else I think needs to be commented on.

Goals: to build an aesthetically pleasing, high-functioning and engaging site/blog that has enough constant interesting content to bring new and returning viewers.

  • I will focus on a few important style and function aspects that I want to improve on my theme and perfect those changes
  • I will have a finished site that looks so good and works so well that I’ll have no choice but to add content
  • I will spend all day Googling questions when I hit a wall
  • I will have a site that looks and works so professionally that visitors who stumble upon it will take it seriously and not know how few pageviews I actually have

I will be using Twenty-Twelve to start out.

Functionality/Design Changes:

  • Post options that allow me to include polls and star ratings to increase engagement beyond comments
  • Post options that allow galleries
  • Custom post for reviews (movie/game/show)
  • Modern colors, fonts, and room for future ads and greatest hits content (I’m going to sketch a mock-up at some point, although the creative art part may be the toughest part)

 

The MAMP behind the curtain

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Learning about how websites are developed and launched from the back end has been — like most things I’ve learned in this class — simultaneously empowering and disappointing. On one hand, I am excited to try setting up my website and developing it on my local server so I can “break” it without affecting what the public sees. On the other hand, the internet seems so much less magical now! Maybe it’s because I haven’t tried navigating the GitHub-MAMP-Cyberduck trifecta yet, but it seems a lot messier and more complicated than I thought it would be. I’ve managed a handful of websites on different CMS platforms and I currently edit another WordPress blog, but I’ve never used a local server before so it’s all been a simple online system. This new local server thing seems more appropriate for a site that I’ll be experimenting on and building independently, so I hope the complexity is worth it.

As far as Codecademy goes, I was pleased to find that PHP was very similar to jQuery and it wasn’t starting all over from scratch with a new language. I still haven’t looked behind the WordPress curtain, so I’m not sure what I’ll find and if I’ll feel comfortable working on it. My goal for the next phase of this course is to try new things and not be afraid to mess up the code. The few moments of true learning and clarity I’ve had with Codecademy have come when the code failed and I’ve had to go back and figure out what I’d messed up.

PHP is HTML with flair

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I am a bit intrigued that PHP is its own language rather than just part of the HTML syntax. I like that the PHP is self-closing and makes it easy to find and, hopefully, easy to work with the code. It makes me chuckle that the PHP language started because a coder wanted to write some code for his own webpage, and it grew into an incredibly popular language used by so many people. It just epitomizes the way that coders live and work.

This week seems to have less concepts to learn and more syntax to learn. I am glad, because I have been feeling like we are constantly building upon what we have already learned, but we usually only did the things we just learned once or twice. Now that we are doing things that allow us to practice using the earlier concepts, I am feeling more confident with the earlier material. I think this is because I learn by repetition and doing something just once or twice isn’t enough to make me confident in the practice.

I’m not sure if this is because it is the summer semester or just the material, but I felt that the first few weeks were a firestorm of new information, and the next few weeks will be figuring out what information was vital and we need to get proficient in.

Having down the basics (I think)

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I think I have down the basics of web development. As long as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery are the basics, I think I’m finally becoming comfortable with each of them. I’ve been redoing JavaScript and jQuery from the past couple weeks in order to drill the lessons into my memory, and it’s starting to work.

I am looking forward to developing a theme. In part, I’m excited because I finally am feeling comfortable with the “basics.” The Codex readings also increased my excitement. I am looking forward to creating something that looks unique. I know I shouldn’t get too far ahead of myself — I doubt I’ll be able to create something ENTIRELY unique at this point — but I want it to be at least a little different from other blogs. Since I’ll be updating a theme, I’ll still be using part of the skeleton built for me. I feel judgmental when I see peoples’ blogs that look the same, and I cannot wait to ensure that mine will not.

I think that when blogs look the same, it strips it of its creativity, because it does not look like an individual. It looks like it’s just one in the same. If you have something you want people to read, the visual part of it is very important. In our PR firm, we have a whole design team to make sure that when the traditional side creates something — whether it be messaging, branding, crisis work, what-have-you — the design team can ensure that it looks good. People are visual creatures. The way a blog looks is extremely important, and being unique is part of that.