William Not your average EMAC student

Presentations

Today was the big day for presentations.  Everyone was prepared and I learned more about some of my fellow classmates today than I'd known all year...there were even students that I didn't even know were in the class present to present...thats a fun heteronym...anyway.

Meagan B.

www.meaganashley.com

Meagan's site is super fun.  She had no real exposure to web development except for MySpace before the internet studio class and, from what she's made of her site, it looks like she learned a lot.  She went thru a few theme changes before she finally settled on what the site is now (I know the feeling).  In the end, she made a great personal site.  The biggest lesson she learned:  community.  Her dad has a site that she is fixing up and she wants to create a community site for her family.

Carol

www.cwelker.com

Carol created a professional page to show off how awesome she is. The site contains samples of her work, her resume, and contact information.  The site aesthetics are very clean and simple, which I think is great for a professional site...someone looking to hire her will have no problem navigating the site.  She even hand coded her resume - impressive.

David Petty

www.theorganicstudent.com

David has setup a blogging site about getting students to eat more healthy.  He's going to try different foods and drinks and review them for students in hopes to promote healthy eating.  Kudos.

Great job to all!

Task List #8

Almost there - home stretch.

I did a little tweaking over the past few days.  Check it out.

I added an RSS link, an RSS email subscription field, a Twitter Icon, Social Media Buttons, a "back to the top" button on the left side of the page as well as completed the footer with some fun stuff.

Enjoy.

www.thecasualgent.com

DFWWP – My Notes

If you can decipher...bonus points if you can decipher.

And it begins...

use of Star Wars for showing examples

We love Wordpress

RD2 did Southwest Airlines Blog, STA Travel World Traveler Internship Site, WOW Cable, and other sites.

What's the big design challenge?

Step away from WordPress

Plan

Explore

Why?

Identify your audience.

Data:

google analytics

quantcast

woopra

polls

surveys

who is looking at the site?

when?

where from?

what pages?

searching what?

browsing with?

do they come back?

location

language?

age?

gender?

education level?

income?

create personas

identify competitors and what they're doing that works

shoot it, snag it, scrap book it

then document what inspires you about it

plan your content

plan and write as much content you can BEFORE you design

should have:

spam prevention

contact form

stats

downloads

related posts

Outline your needs

Create a wireframe - be sure to include your features list

Sounds all to familiar, eh?  Like Randy's class crammed into an hour.  Zzzz.  Good energy from the other dorks in the room.  Ah ha - Community!

Twitter = Community

Well?  Is it?

Its funny.  I've been a part of Twitter for a year and my use is not only increasing but also evolving.  And the funny thing is, Twitter is evolving just as quickly.  What started in 2006 is completely different that what we know as Twitter today.

Mashable.com did a big write up on how to make a community from Twitter.  And they had a great list of "to-do's" on how to do just that.

1.  Create a user-friendly Twitter ID (@yourname)

2.  Search for people to follow

3.  Learn the lingo.  You'll want to join the crowd.

4.  Know who "@" replies to you.

5.  Add your Twitter ID to all of your signatures.

6.  Reach out at say something.

7.  Read the bio of those who follow you.

8.  Promote others and share your best information

9.  Learn the etiquette.

10.  Find out who some of the big players are.

This is just a short list of what Mashable had to say and they are all really great points.

I use Twitter for a plethora of expressions.  I tweet information, news, random sightings, interesting photos, song lyrics that move me, links to blogs, links to my own blog, and a number of other twitterations that I feel are worthy to be posted on the net.

Twitter - in my opinion - is very much a community.  I've reached out to so many people via Twitter that I've never even met.  I've setup meetings with editors, PR managers, and others who, without Twitter, I would have never connected with.

Twitter may be less personal that Facebook (and definitely less personal than a face-to-face relationship) but their tagline "Join the Conversation" is just that - join in and you will build those relationships that turn from digital to physical...and not like that, dirty.

It’s Been a Long Time Coming

The end is near.

Never have I ever been so relieved to read those words.

Looking back, however, its been quite the journey.  I remember sitting in the first class just daydreaming about what the hell I was actually doing in this class.  I never thought I'd learn as much as I did (or get as frustrated as I did with a stinkin' blog site).  But, alas, all things come to fruition.

Even though we are at the end, I still feel very much at the beginning of the journey for The Casual Gent.  Running a blog has always been a goal of mine and you don't know just how thrilled I was when it turned out that I could do it in class for a grade.  Sheer glee.  What goes up, must come down, and I definitely had a few choice words for Wordpress, Blue Host, PHP, HTML, CSS and the dreaded Javascript...but here I sit, still alive, still kicking, slightly smarter in my coding abilities, and surprisingly itching to learn more.

Kudos Randy - I drank the Kool-Aid - and begged for seconds.

I still feel that I will need to nurture my little baby blog to be the strapping young lad that I envision - but I know that it all takes time.  The site will evolve in time - organically - as needed - as desired by the single digit readers that I have now...to the thousands in the future?  Who knows?!?

The Casual Gent will strike a chord with some and definitely not all.  I'm ok with that.  I hope to shed a little light on the casual gentleman in everyman (and woman, for that matter).  Come back often, I'll be glad you did.

Here's to a great semester.

Task List #7

Here's another blog post for my task list.

Its on shaving cream guys...and gals.

http://www.thecasualgent.com/hydroplane/

Task List #6

My Task #6 was a blog post.

This one is not focused on style - its some music

Enjoy.

www.thecasualgent.com/gc/

Task List #5

Number 5 on my list was to create a favicon - which I did.

If you visit my site www.thecasualgent.com, you will see the image in the browser bar.  It's a mini-version of this:

Task List #4

Alright - Task #4 Complete.

The first post.

Here ya go!

http://www.thecasualgent.com/jcrewfall2010/

W

Holy PHP!

After much stress and aggravation - my PHP assignment is complete.

Halle-freakin'-lujah!  Happy Good Friday!

www.thecasualgent.com/ATEC3361/origins.php