STA Blog

Week 2 & 3 & 4

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Week 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 Recap:

Week 1&2 of my STA Journey:

  • I Became familiar with various tools used in day-to-day work.
  • Created a personalized banner for the blog
  • Started assigned training modules.
  • Completed my Web Accessibility Standards Training
  • Discovered the significance of building accessible websites.
  • Realized the importance of inclusivity and providing alternate formats of information.
  • Learned about Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools, such as Wave, for analyzing websites for compliance with accessibility laws.
  • Utilized Figma to correct errors flagged by wave accessibility tools.

Wave Accessibility tool Logo 

Wave Accessibility Tool 

Errors detected by Wave Evaluation Tool

Errors detected when I analyzed Byjus.com

In Week 3&4 of my STA Journey:

I built my first website using WordPress. The website taught beginners to use WordPress. Let me walk you through the various phases here!

 

Phase 0) Brainstorming

Before building my website, I drew a rough sketch on my notes app. At this point I asked De’sha for feedback regarding my rough plan and learned more about menu icons in the realm of website. As a digital native, I am sure we must have come across the menu bar  (three horizontal lines stacked on top of each other). I learned that the menu bar was called a hamburger and there’s a whole suite of names for the different icons used in WebDesign. I found this information really interesting and wanted to share it with the readers of the blog!

List of Names for Menu Icons in Web-Design

Menu Icons

 

My Brainstorm Process

BrainStorm Process 

Phase 1) Implementation

While no one likes to face problems, I believe that the best way to learn is through consistently failing. Here, I will list all of my mistakes and what I learned from them.

 

  1. Implementation is hard but doable if you persevere. Initially, I had no idea what themes were and I kept switching out themes to build my project. This created a couple issues because I was not able to locally customize certain things as the local customization did’t have precedence over the pre-built theme customization. It was mid-project that I learned from a colleague that Astra is really powerful theme for customization purposes, so I stuck to that. Lesson: Don’t keep changing themes in WordPress
  2. The global customization theme is your BestFriend! Starting off, I was unsure of utilizing global headers and global footers so I would spend a lot of time, individually customizing my global headers and footer for each page. The main problems with this implementation was 1) The headers and footers were not consistent across the pages and 2) A lot of time had to be spent in making these features consistent across pages.  Lesson: Master Global features.
  3. Another issue I had was implementing the menu bars. Before I built my website, I knew that I needed a navigation bar. So naturally, making that part work was very important to me. However, I was just not able to get the hamburger to show up. It was so frustrating. I watched Youtube Tutorials, spent a lot of time tinkering with WordPress only to conclude that perhaps Astra does not support Menu icons.  Lesson: Don’t axe your vision because it does not seem to work at first. 
  4. When in doubt, ask for help. This step is super important. After being frustrated at not being able to implement certain features, I asked for help from my Web-Dev supervisor. So we spent about an hour on a call where he explained how to go about implementing menu bars and sub-menus, thinking about Global features, overwriting of certain features, and increasing responsiveness of the website. Lesson: Try everything before you ask for help. That way you are prepared to learn the most. 

 

Phase 2) Feedback

I asked around for feedback. For me, this is one of the most exciting phases of building anything. I get a sense of what is working and what is not. I am also able to step out of my capacity as a creator of the project and criticize some of my own choices which pushes me to improve what I build.

 

  • Here’s a list some of the feedback I got:
  1. Improve your about me page.
  2. Have a banner for your landing page because it is the first thing people see and it is important to make it as catchy as possible.
  3. Have some sort of color palette.
  4. Keep your fonts consistent.
  5. Explore word hierarchy.
  6. Utilize horizontal scroll.

 

Phase 3) Repeat implementation

  • I incorporated different suggestions to make my website look attractive.
  • I decided to distinguish my website from other websites by turning the highlighted portion green.
  • I also made a menu with sub-menu and rounded the edges of them to make it more inviting for learners.
  • I was not able to explore utilizing horizontal scroll, but I will keep that in mind to implement in future websites.
  • I was able to build a uniform header and footer for my website.
  • I also implemented features that improved the responsiveness of the website.

 

Final Product! 

& drum-roll! I have been talking about my project through the entire blog without showing you my final product. So, here’s my first ever website! Enjoy 🙂

Link to Website

 

Week 2/5 – 2/9

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Additions to the Precourse Video

After getting some notes on the current video, one part that was suggested was to make the emergency exit sequence more of a map route style.

Currently, the sequence shows the exit doors as the voice over describes the location. So now, we’re gonna try and do an iteration of the scene based on a map of the room. Here’s what the map looks like.

 

Here are some iterations I made.

It’s all a work in progress and I was given notes to make the map reflect the look of the studio itself so I’ll be working on that this week as well as other assets.

 

New Assignment: UTFC Banners

This was a pretty straightforward assignment as we just had to use a tamplate to make banners for the textbook. Here are examples of the banners I made.

Week 35 Spring Semester

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Week 35

Project: Shiny App

Started on:  Feb 9, 2023

Staff Guidance: Stacy

Description: The main objectives of the project lies on the creation of a map application to help students, researchers or map enthusiastic to build and filter the map based on the data they had. The Global Voyages Map have several important functions that make this objective happen including uploading the file through CSV files or through an online link, generating the map with filter slider and filter voyage and download the map as a standalone html file.

Currently, there are several features implemented which is uploading the file, generating the map and downloading the map. There are filter slider for dates and voyages. However, the only thing that does not work well is the filter slider since the map and the filter resets after the user touches and tinker around the filter.

More surprisingly, the problem only occurs on my end not on the client’s side. I suspect the discrepancies happen because of the mismatch of the versions of R and R studio, but even after I install the same version of the software, the problem persists. Therefore, it takes me so much time to figure out the problem.

I also tried Dash, another R studio alternative, to see if I can make the application work easily with their platform. However, the download button does not work smoothly for Plotply map.

 

 

 

Spring 2024 Weeks 2+3

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Texas German Retractable Banner #10

Client/Prof: Margaret Blevins
Completion Status: Started on Sept 21
Staff Guidance: De’sha
Completed on: Jan 30

Done with banner #10! Here is the final version:

STA Roster Poster Spring 2024

Client/Prof: LAITS
Completion Status: Started on Jan 23
Staff Guidance: De’sha

I’m so excited to be doing the STA poster this semester! Currently we’re in the drafting phase. Though I’d love to show more of my drafts, unfortently I’ve been having trouble uploading my images so here’s just a few of my drafts to show.

Here’s an early draft:

And then we took a new direction to embrace more of a paper-y look, which brought me here:

And this is the idea we’ll be pursuing further!

 

December Weeks

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Here’s a recap on what I worked on in December / since my last post! Last year (hahahaha)!

PHY 317K & PHY 317L: General Physics I and General Physics II – Animated Intro

Client/Prof: Dr. Viranga Perera
Completion Status: Started on Nov 29
Staff Guidance: De’sha
Completed on: Dec 22-ish

Created an animated intro for PHY317K/PHY317L using two intro templates.

HIS 315L: The United States Since 1865 – Pre-Roll/Title Slide

Client/Prof:Dr. Jeremi Suri
Completion Status: Started on Dec 12
Staff Guidance: De’sha
Completed on: Jan 10

Worked a lot on this project where I created all these little graphics for a pre-roll and title slide for HIS 315L! I tried to pick different objects/people from the previous graphics for the class and then did a lot of tracing/shape layer in Illustrator to get to the final designs. De’sha stepped in when I left for break and did the final touches.

CC 306M: Introduction to Medical and Scientific Terminology – Backdrops + stinger

Client/Prof: Dr. Tom Curtis
Completion Status: Started on Nov 28
Staff Guidance: De’sha
Completed on: Dec 19

Continuing this project from November, I added a few alternate backdrops to be tested:

Also made another little stinger:

Texas German Retractable Banner #10

Client/Prof: Margaret Blevins
Completion Status: Started on Sept 21
Staff Guidance: De’sha

More edits to this project! We’re currently making a few text edits so things are shifting around. Here’s one draft of where we’re at right now: