Neil: Great job capturing everyone’s attention with your introduction! Your story of extravagance and luxury got everybody to listen intently and gave a vivid (and maybe slightly hyperbolic) idea of your goals with your website.
By including a good explanation and introduction before even putting your website on screen, you gave everyone the frame of mind you wanted them to have rather than having them create one themselves. The presentation was focused, informative, and brilliant.
While I’m not a big fan of extravagance, your website is brilliant. You found a both a primary and secondary audience, identified them, and found a way to appeal to both. Excellent work all around.
Ken: Your presentation was extremely well-formed. Your introduction, supplemented by your drawings, really held my interest, even though your website was “just” a portfolio website.
I really appreciate that you mentioned that you’re both an artist and a coder. Seeing how you work helped give me a perspective on how to present myself as both a creative writer and a coder.
Make sure you fix the Mac compatibility issue as soon as you can! It’s tough, but making sure your website works across as many platforms as possible is one of the most important things you can do. If it’s not good to go already, though, I’m sure you’ll have it soon.
Your work is clean and to the point. Keep it up; I’m looking forward to seeing more drawings from you.
William: You did a great job supplementing your presentation from the showcase in class. I really appreciated being able to see all the plugins you used to make your website work; it gave me a lot of ideas for my own websites and put your design and audience focus into a technical light.
I really hope The Casual Gent flourishes. You’ve got a great concept, a fantastic idea of your audience, and even a plan to set yourself apart from other mens’ lifestyle blogs and magazines. Good luck!
Added a logo, a bunch of widgets, and some cleanup to my front page. Ditched the main social feed and the whiteboard idea; neither worked out to the page’s advantage.
While the RD2, Inc. talk at the latest DFW Wordpress meetup reiterated many points made in this course, they showed off several interesting techniques and tips that I hadn’t considered.
While I have done wireframing in the past, I always just doodled it out on a piece of notebook paper and kept it as a rough guide. Their clean, grid paper wireframes were far more usable (and legible), and could keep me from staring at Photoshop for hours on end trying to figure out how to place all my site elements. Paper is far easier to manipulate than a 50-layer PSD.
The idea of hiring as few outside designers as possible also caught my attention. It really drove home the point that I either need to be proficient in both coding and design, or I need to find someone I work incredibly well with. At this point, the latter seems more likely, but only time will tell.
As always, the presentation was worthwhile, and the Twitter side discussions were lively. I look forward to the next meetup!
If you’d like to view the slides from the presentation, you can visit the RD2 website. The next meetup will be in May (the event isn’t up yet as of this writing). Who’s planning on going even though class will be over?
To a certain extent, the internet has always been focused around community. In the beginning, it was a group of colleges using it. Usenet created a framework for lots of small communities. Even AOL touted some community features, especially related to gaming.
Yes, the paradigm of a community-focused web has always been around, but it has seen a major surge (relatively) recently with emerging prominent commenting systems, social media, and other tools that allow users to heavily interact with websites.
Now community is crucial to any website that wants anything beyond purely informational functionality. We have discussed that visitors are drawn to websites with continually updating content, and a community can supply that.
In addition, community supplies a human element that can’t be found on a static page. You’re not just learning, you’re talking to a huge group of people, all of whom share a common interest with you. The possibilities for discussion are wide open, and the social web thrives.
Two main types of pages have emerged from this: websites that hold communities and websites that facilitate communities. The former is specifically tailored to a niche, while the latter serves a wider customer base, and acts as a service rather than a content creator.
Creating a community could seriously advance mine and others’ brands and reputations within my niche. I’m considering building a community for web and multimedia editors and multimedia content creators on student newspapers. Other student newspaper works as well as the journalism industry would be secondary audiences that could take interest in the work and experiments we perform.
As far as I can tell, this niche is fairly poorly serviced. At student journalism conferences, a number of the web editors wind up meeting at talks, interest sessions, roundtables, and, most interestingly, using Twitter hashtags. It would be wonderful to have a more structured, supportive community for the emerging field.
Thoughts on this? Post them in the comments!
My website wasn’t meant to do much other than show off my work and abilities. Interestingly, it makes presentation somewhat difficult — how do I talk about a website about me without just talking about myself in what could be the three most narcissistic minutes of my life?
The key, I believe, will be to focus on the creation of the website itself, using my own traits as “why” evidence for the different attributes of the page.
As I mentioned before, I really wanted my personal website to combine feelings of play and professionalism to promote my personal brand. I will discuss how the whiteboard photo (which should be ready Thursday) accomplishes this combination, effectively reinforcing the idea that my personality reinforces my dual nature of coder and writer.
This does more than appeal to two different audiences. The design will hopefully draw in a third audience: employers who are looking for professionals who can bridge the gap between the creative team and the programming team. These skills are essential to web design and coding, and displaying them should help me gain work in the field.
The category page I coded will be another focus. Not only did it add significant functionality to my website, it also taught me that extending Wordpress is actually much easier than it seems. My prior knowledge of PHP helped, but extending the template wasn’t very difficult.
To finish, I will present my portfolio page. While it’s mostly bare right now, it still holds strong significance. The only work I have there is still a substantial effort, as I not only created a major style overhaul for a CMS, I also continually update it, proving my ability to carry out long-term projects.
Hopefully, my website will impress those I present it to, even though they aren’t necessarily my target audience. I’m actually looking forward to both showing off my website and seeing my classmates’ websites Friday.
I set up my portfolio for this task…and it turns out I only have one piece. Oh dear. To make up for it, I added another post to the writing section.
I just coded my own category page! The theme I purchased didn’t seem to come with one, so I wrote one and added some custom code that only appears in the writing category.
Please note that the nonfiction button doesn’t work yet because I haven’t uploaded any of those works yet.
It also turns out WooThemes’ portfolio themes don’t function properly if you don’t specify a portfolio category, as it assumes every category is a portfolio category. Creating an empty portfolio category solved the issue quickly.
I added some of my writing as blog posts and set up the writing link to visit the category. The Wordpress category feature doesn’t seem to be working completely properly, though; it’s showing my social feed as well. Fixing that may have to be another task.
UPDATE: It looks like the theme I chose does not have a category template page; anything that isn’t the portfolio get sent straight to the same archive page. I’m adding “Create a writing category page” as another task.
Hey guys, I made this awesome mythology web page! By that, I mean Professor Hoyt made one and I replicated it using PHP includes.