Week 15 - I'm Done!!

I am done!

This past week has been spent tidying up some loose ends on this project, including catching up on this blog.

Nicole, Rodney, and I discussed citing sources for the images. I completely forgot to address that.

I got a little code from my SME and made some nice, pale grey, tiny "sources" underneath each graphic in the project. I also finished the Resources page (formerly the Development page), and listed the images and sources by its location in the website.

I spent an entire day making little edits. They were just some word choices here and there, and they may not even be noticeable to most people, but I think they improve the readability and effectiveness of the project.

As a writing major, isn't that the point?

Finally, I finally created the Style Guide now that I know I'm not changing any of the style. Or, as we call it at work, "code lock." No more changes.

Now, it's time to go to sleep, because tomorrow afternoon is my oral defense.

I'm not nervous... no, not at all...wish me luck!

Week 14 - Ok... I give.

Ok... I give.

The "fun bits" I envisioned for this project are just not happening.

I had so many plans.

I was going to make maps that "did things" when you mouse over them. I was going to narrate pieces of the information. I was going to have some video. I was going to have some animated .gifs...

There just wasn't enough time. And frankly, most of it was beyond my ability right now.

I have to put the priority on the content. The content of the website is the "meat," the "guts." I love this topic, and I can't sacrifice the content for a few arty bits.

It's better that I include all the salient points of this subject in a way that maintains the user's interest and understanding... even if a cup of tea had some animated steam rising out of it would have been super cute!

I soothed my disappointment by making a batch of the cream scones from the recipe page.

They were delicious!

Week 13 - Baroque and Brocade

Baroque and brocade are two words I've heard for years but never had a need to know much about either.

It turns out my website has both.

On the Britain page, I used a brocade pattern for the background image. And on the Britain and East India Company pages, they each include baroque music.

I had fun researching the music for this project, though I did lose an entire Saturday to the effort.

With the exception of the Chinese music on the History page, each main page includes an image and a music file of a British composer of that time period.

I didn't know "classical" music was divided into different periods before this.  This project spans the 17th-19th centuries, which include the "baroque," "classical," "impressionist," and "modern" genres of classical music, and I have included pieces from many of them.

I like baroque music.  I've often listened to The Baroque Show on NPR on Sunday mornings, but now I know I have some historical context to go with it, which makes it that much more enjoyable!

Week 13 - Reorganization

I have not been happy with the layout of the main pages. The homepage is the only one I storyboarded, after all, and I like it very much.

But the rest of the pages... I've struggled with how to organize the content so the user is not have to read a ton of information.  That's boring for the user, and probably a little fatiguing too.

I was waiting for inspiration to strike me, so I could figure out how to make some fun little bits to present some of the content on each page. But that hasn't happened yet.

I told my HTML SME, "I do not like the way the content looks on all these pages. It's looks amateur. It looks like I vomited bullet points on the page with some images stuck in. I hate it."

I spent some time surfing around, to fond a layout I like.

The BBC has some nice vertical columns, http://www.bbc.co.uk/, for their Entertainment, Health, Technology, and Sciences pages.

I told my SME, "I want columns like these. These are pretty!" My SME gave me the code, showed me how to get it to work on one page, and I copied it onto the bottom of every main page throughout the site.

This did two wonderful things right away: It lightened the page of half the text, and it gave me a way to organize small chunks of information while keeping them small chunks instead of lengthy paragraphs.

I did the same for the upper part of the page, finding a layout I liked at http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/our-work. We made a narrow, left-hand column that stacks vertically, and a wider column on the right for a large picture and the main text of the page. Copy and paste the code for all that onto each page, organize all the content, and viola.

Now that the pages have some structure, and I'm using my resources in a smart way, I feel so much better about the project!!  

Week 12 - I'm a Photoshop genius!

Ok, maybe "genius" is too strong a word, but I am definitely very impressed with myself today!

I found this lovely piece of toile wallpaper to use as a background image for the project.

It's perfect, and I love it. But I need to tile it so it repeats across the screen. I stared at it for about five minutes and looked for places I could crop it without chopping up any of the objects.

It can't be done.

This is where my genius comes in. Maybe it's something I heard somewhere along the line, and I'm just remembering it. Whichever. I'll take it.

I found a point in the image that repeats, the man kneeling on the ground, and used the center of his shoulder as a repeat point.

 
I cropped the image, horizontally, from the center of his shoulder to the center of the next kneeling man. Then I cropped the image vertically on a different point, the top of the chicken's tail feathers.

I ended up with a perfect, tileable image.

Very pleased. Very pleased indeed.

Week 12 - "Opium" May be a Problem

At work, I have access to Internet Explorer 9, which I do not have at home.

This gives me a good opportunity to test the website as I go and see how it looks in different browsers.

That is, until I got to the Silver Triangle page. It turns out that words like "opium," "drug dealing," "selling drugs," and "addiction" hit the filters at work, and it has blocked the page from showing.

This never occurred to me.

So... I tried to change the page name from "opium" to "silvertriangle," but that didn't make a difference. The internet filter looks at the content on the page, not just the URL name and suffix.

It works just fine at home, of course, and I'm able to test in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer 8. That will have to do.

I just hope the Honors panel isn't going to be viewing this in IE9...

Week 11 - The Value of Subject Matter Experts

I am learning the value of Subject Matter Experts, or SMEs (rhymes with sneeze).

As a technical writer who is fairly new to the field, I work with SMEs every day. In the strict sense, for my job, these are the business analysts and developers, but they are also my fellow tech writers in the office. I work with such a supportive, knowledgeable group of writers!

A few things occurred to me this week with regard to this project: a) I'm running out of time, b) building everything twice in "live" and "sandbox" environments is a time suck that I can't afford, c) I need to get help from a SME.

It's already week 11, and I have to present this Nicole at the beginning of week 14. Yikes! As worthwhile as it is to work in a sandbox environment, I was wasting time. I got more and more comfortable with Dreamweaver, and I'm very, very careful about "putting," and "saving" and working in only one index.shtml at a time.

Here's an example: I worked for an hour on a beautiful header graphic, uploaded it onto the site, and was not able to see it for another hour before I realized all that work was stuck in the sandbox and not actually on my live site. That's when I decided to scrap the sandbox.

I have spent so much time trying to learn HTML this semester that I lost sight of my project for a couple weeks. I don't have to know the ins and outs of HTML or be an expert in HTML. As long as I know enough, or can access the code, to make this project the best it can be, that's all I need.

If this semester was meant to be about learning HTML, I would have kept digging into the HTML books. But it wasn't!

This semester was meant to be about presenting my lovely tea research paper in a new and unique way, using technical writing skills and tools.

And as a technical writer for a software development company, I don't need to know the code behind the software. I only need to know enough about its functionality to write about it for the end user.

As a technical writer, working cooperatively with a SME to get the information I need is what I do.

That's when I decided to call in a SME of my own. My SME knows HTML, and I know how to pay attention to which code does what, how to copy/paste it where it belongs, and how to alter it for my needs.

When I described this realization to my SME, he gave me a patient smile and said, "I wondered how long it would take you to come to this conclusion." And then we got to work.

I asked, "How do I get a shadow to appear underneath all my images?" My SME gave me the code, showed me how to get it to work on one page, and I copied it onto every single graphic throughout the site.

I asked, "How do I prevent my internal and external links from appearing with a blue line underneath, and how do I prevent them from changing color after the page has been visited?" My SME gave me the code, showed me how to get it to work on one page, and I copied it onto every single link throughout the site.

I did this for dozens of coding situation throughout the project, and it is FINALLY started to take shape!