Stacy and I had discussed opportunities to practice HTML & CSS coding, therefore he directed me to a COLA Lab site and told me to work with WordPress, HTML, and CSS to customize it however I’d like. This was more of a practicing activity as opposed to real deliverable work.

Here is a screenshot of the homepage of the Gonzalez-Lima Lab:

We copied over the content into a new WordPress template as a starting point, in which it looked like this:

I went into the WordPress and played with the widgets + HTML & CSS, and the resultant work was this:

(Well… I went back to the website and it looks like Stacy worked with Ben on the same practice site, therefore Ben’s work is there and my work is no longer there… 🙁 )

At least here’s a dialogue between Stacy and I on Slack that indicates that I did accomplish something…

 

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After that, Andre and I had a lengthy meeting regarding the COLA Website redesign – a massive project that will likely take many months if not longer to fully complete. The desire is to redesign the UI/UX of the entire COLA web space, such that the COLA faculty presence becomes much more robust and attractive. We’re in the very beginning stages of this project currently, however Andre gave me the action item of reaching out to the site’s strongest users – the site admins – and getting feedback from them.

There are 86 departments in COLA, with 2 website admins each. I’ve been using the Cascade CMS to obtain current site admin contact information and contacting them in order to either verify that they are still site admins or to acquire new site admins because there happened to be none listed in the specific department in the CMS. This task has been what I’ve worked on for the past 2 weeks, and will be what I continue working on this week.

This task is not at all visual but rather very communication-based. Back-and-forth, I’ve had at least 200 emails sent or received so far.

 

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In the thick of this, last week Suloni gave me the task of creating a banner for NAIS.

(2 versions)

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/18686-2/

I am beginning to get into coding work as an STA, so I spent one week going through an HTML/CSS tutorial online (http://learn.shayhowe.com/html-css/). It was quite a lot of information and a lot of work to follow along, but I’m happy with the final product.

Here are screenshots of the project website at various points from scratch to final product:

 

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Getting to know HTML

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Getting to know HTML

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Using the Box Model

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Positioning Content

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Working with Typography

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Setting Backgrounds & Gradients

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Creating Lists

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Adding Media

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Organizing Data with Tables

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Adding Media

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Building Forms

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Here is a screenshot of a snippet of the code (HTML & CSS) that produced the above webpages:

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Two weeks ago, Andre gave the new STAs a tutorial on Cascade, the CMS that the College of Liberal Arts uses. We’ve been assigned Cascade training in order to help familiarize ourselves with the system.

 

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I also created a quick mock-up of another possible design of the Texas Beyond History Trans Pecos webpage in Photoshop.

 

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After finishing the HTML/CSS tutorial, I’m now working with Stacy to begin writing the HTML/CSS for some of the Texas Beyond History webpage mockups that we’ve been creating over the past two weeks.

 

I’ve just completed my first two weeks as a Student Technology Assistant for UT LAITS. Here are some of the projects and tasks that I’ve been working on:

For the Texas Beyond History project, I went through the Coastal Prehistoric site (Lay of the Land) and edited the HTML in order to transfer the old TBH website’s content to the new TBH website.

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I also went through the South Texas Plains map on the old TBH website and obtained the XY coordinates of all squares, circles, and triangles. The data gathered will be used to pinpoint the locations on the South Texas Plains map on the new TBH website.

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I’ve done some work on the Texas Pacos Mountains & Basins page as well. I reformatted the circle links in Ancient Places such that when clicked upon, they no longer create pop-up windows (as the old TBH site did) but rather the content pops up underneath and on the same page.

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The user-interface of this new layout wasn’t good, so I went into Photoshop and drafted a mock-up of a design that Suloni, Ruben, and I discussed might be a good option.

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Lastly, some ID processing!

I just finished STA Orientation!