Week II: Pages and Banners
Project: COLA Website Refresher
Client /Prof: N/A (College of Liberal Arts)
completion status: Started on August 30, 2021
staff guidance: Michelle Vanhoose, Chris Rankin
STA team members: Rahul, Ingrid
description/plans: Learn Pages and begin to transfer COLA website content into new CMS
To be completed: TBD (long-term)
A lot to cover today!
Cascade
At the very start of the week, I wrapped up the last part of my Cascade test site, adding buttons I had drawn in Photoshop the previous Friday.
Pages
Most of this week was spent working on my Pages training for the COLA Web Refresh Project. Pages, as you may know by now, is a new CMS the COLA website is being migrated into from Cascade. The first part of this involved creating a personal site about an interest or hobby, and much like my Cascade page, I chose a natural science theme. Though for this one, I started with a homepage providing some basic information about myself.
Nested below this, I created six other pages for a paleontology-themed info portal (sorry for the plagarism, Rahul, but I did do a different era). This included a “hub” with links to five other pages, mostly in order to use all the text and image formatting features of Pages without cluttering them all into one page.
Hub page
Species subpage
I found the limitations of Pages quite apparent, such as the difficulty displaying images with much freedom. I tried embedding an image into a tab using html which promptly deleted itself, as well as creating an image button with a single line of text (this will show up again later!) to no avail. I will say I got everything done much faster than I probably would have in Cascade, albeit with less creative freedom.
My next assignment was to compose a formal writeup email on my project so far, which doesn’t have much information not already in this blog post, so I’ll omit it.
After that I began practicing transferring content from the old COLA site into pages, rewriting ten in total. 80% of it was very straightforward (copying bodies of text and reuploading header images) but 20% was quite time-consuming in that it took a lot of mental energy to rework complicated pages into the more limited framework of Pages. One page (shown below) included a slideshow of different images, links, and embedded videos at the top of the page, of which no analogy exists in Pages.
The most tedious part was finding a way to insert two images with single-sentence captions (There it is again! Grrrrrr!). Since Pages has no option for a single image with a single line of text, my attempts included:
- Using “Image Buttons” to display the images with one line of text (but this feature has a minimum of 3 buttons, and each has to be a hyperlink)
- Using the “Two Cards” Feature with the captions as the body text, but I had no way to remove the title, or split the text between the body and title
- Using the “Text & Image” feature with each image’s caption as the main body of text (but the spacing created a huge gap
- Using the “Text & Image” feature with each image’s caption below the image and other text in the main body (also created a spacing issue)
- Using the “Text & Image” feature with one image made by combining both in Photoshop
