Basic Trainings
I finally finished the image tracing tutorial! It is published to the KB now. It needed a lot of updates and new screenshots, which took awhile, but I think it’s a lot more comprehensive now. When I was rewriting this basic training, I was trying to organize the steps better and give more context for each step because I think it helps people learn and remember things better (it helps me at least). I also tried to make it more visually interesting and fun.
The process for redoing a basic training training is basically 1) Make a draft with an original banner and, if necessary, updated screenshots, 2) Get feedback from the lead STA on Basecamp (Abriella’s is the lead in this case–she’s overseeing all the basic trainings), 3) Make edits and publish the draft, then if we can, 4) Get feedback from somebody who’s actually doing the training.
Today I’m going to be adding a few more tips to the gif basic training because another STA (Jake) was going through it and found some features that I missed which are helpful for animating in Photoshop. I also have a 3rd basic training that’s going to be based on a tutorial that Suloni found online, which I’m going to start working on soon. It looks really fun so I’m excited about starting that.
KB Table of Contents
Abriella, Maddy and I are also still in the process of revamping the Knowledge Base site. We want the basic trainings to be featured better on the site so they’re easy for new STAs to find, plus we cleared out a lot of outdated posts that were adding clutter to the site.
Here is what the old table of contents looked like. Also, it’s not shown in this screenshot, but the categories in the right sidebar used to be twice as long (we removed a lot of the unnecessary ones)
And here’s the current (but still work-in-progress) table of contents. It is the new landing page of the site. Abriella made the banner, I made the headers and tags, which we may or may not keep in the final design. I thought the tags would be the easiest way to label basic trainings, because you can just copy and paste the tag into the table of contents and the actual post. It’s maybe not the most efficient tagging system, but the WordPress theme this site uses is pretty limited, so there aren’t a lot of options available.
Here’s what the basic trainings could potentially look like if we add the tags to the top of each post:
