Daryl Hansen

Presentation

I’m pretty excited about the presentation, since I actually like this kind of “performance” work. It took me a while to get used to the process (7 years of music performance where I could not do solos well), but now it is fun to express my knowledge on a topic to others. In this presentation, I aim to outline the site’s objectives, show some of my “competition” website, show what I learned from them, add those components to what I learned from class, and detail my final product. This then becomes a presentation of growth towards a final product, my current website.

I’m going to explore other professor’s websites (mostly bad) to demonstrate what not to do, even in the field my website is focused towards. The key in the design was focusing on the balance between flashy and conventional. Since other professors websites were designs from the 1990s, I could not deviate too far from them with powerful flash sites or complex menus. Furthermore, focusing on this type of design allows me to revamp the site to focus on my call to action as well.

Stressing what I learned in class augments what knowledge was gained from examining other related websites. Whether it was material from books, sites, or class work, these components assisted my design and ability to implement each function or page component. During the presentation, I will detail a few components that allowed me to make unique differentiations, or allow me to accomplish what I learned from other websites.

Next, I will detail the final product. The home page, cv, and blog sections demonstrate the most about my site. I may view some of the other pages briefly to show correlation to other professor’s websites depending upon time. However, these pages demonstrate the key components I am stressing during this presentation: growth and differentiation from other professor websites. These pages were either extensively modified by me, show a unique component, or look good.

Javascript

here is my javascript version of the mythology page.

Task #7

I made a blog post about my most inspirational research paper related to what I’ll be working on for the next many years. Check it out here.

Task #6

For this task, I finished up the CSS for my CV, setup the blog and recent activity segments of my site. I tried setting up the slider and homepage to pull these segments as well, but apparently there needs to be some modifications to the theme to allow this. I found a post on the woothemes page… but since I don’t have the membership, I cannot access it. I imagine there is a small change to the slider/featured segments to allow for pulling post information. It also seems like I might be able to make “exceptions” in the code for specific pages that it pulls from its list in the php files. I also modified some for the CSS for the whole site as well. I changed the footer.php file as well.

Visit the site here.

Task #5

I made a logo (not on my task list, but something I felt was in tune with the homepage work) and configured my home page to fit my website. The logo isn’t a true “logo” but takes the place as the site’s header image. I still need to get a few tweaks done for my home page to be “complete”. I need to write a php page that pulls the most recent post from the recent updates and trims it to only a specific word count (although that may not be necessary). I also need to get a quality image of myself (I’ll ask one of my photography friends) and 2 other images related to my webpage (maybe the school’s logo, which requires checking copyright info on using the logo on my site, and some image of a robot, which I’ll likely have to buy). Another cosmetic change would be changing the footer to fit the information in it. This means I might trim the subsections off or write my own simpler footer. Also, I still need to talk to Randy about the blog on my site, since I can make posts, but cannot show a “traditional” blog view in this theme. I imagine that I can use the recent posts to feed a press release recent activity feed on the site but will require a new wordpress site setup for the blog itself.

I was wondering where the contact button should be: in the slider or on the sidebar. I like how strongly the sidebar button stands out (plus, the text widget censors my phone number and an image blurs in contrast to the site’s text). However, having it twice on the page seems too much. The original inspiration for the slider’s button came from a site like Mozilla Firefox’s site, but that may not be the best route. Also, the “logo” idea seems to work, but I have other ideas if it doesn’t seem to look right.

Please let me know what you think.

Task #4

I’ve been trying to get my resume created correctly for sooooo long now… and it is not completely working out well. I still have some formatting issues that i cannot seem to change, so I imagine that I will have to ask Randy Hoyt how to do it correctly.

I also wrote a print.css version for people to be able to print my resume; however, the wordpress theme seems to overwrite this css file with its own print css file! I cannot seem to find the css include and my link in the header is overwritten. Again, I will have to ask how to change this.

There was a way to save my resume in word as a webpage, but the layout and extra data (pages and pages of styling not used and inline styling) was ridiculous and unmanageable. However, it does look exactly like I want it…

While my resume here does not look perfect, it does show what I am aiming for. The text seems to fall off the “page” or wrap around more in the online version. I included the contact information on the CV only in the print version (which in my print.css file, lines up exactly like in the pdf). I’ll probably upload a version of my CV too for download as well (with buttons for print and download on the page).

You can see the css files here and here. You can look at my resume online here. The pdf version with the formatting I want can be seen here.

PHP Files

you can see it here

Task #3

I did the wordpress setup, site structure and plugin setup. Visiting the site may not reveal much, but ive put in thing like google analytics, databse plugins and blog plugins from the information from this weeks reading. I’ve configured them all as well. Also, I’ve put in all the major pages for the site structure.

site link

Task #2

I added a contact form page. I need to make some cosmetic changes, since the boxes and submit button fall into the white page space too much. For the image data, I want to align it to the right of the whole contact form. This means I still have to go in and change all of the php content get code and css styling for this page.

UPDATE: Made the changes to styling that I like.

Contact page

Task #1

For this task, I created a professional biography for my website. In this biography, I detail my qualifications similar to a CV but in paragraph form. I have modeled my biography after other professor’s biographies.

I also included a personal biography which details my life versus my professional experiences.

Link to the page