Week 24

STA Training: Google Analytics

Started on: April 18, 2023

Completed on: April 21, 2023

Staff Guidance: Stacy

Description: For this project, I got to learn Google Analytics. Basically, it is a tool that can help with tracking the user that visits your website. It can give you a beautiful visual aid that displays different information about the user including the duration of their session and what types of activities they partake when they visit it.

Here are some lessons I learnt about Google Analytics.

1) It is easy to set up google analytics property with data stream in which it connects to a website. Just put a tag in the head of the HTML file. Then, the data collection method will be updated in GA with pretty graphs and everything like that.
2) There is Google Tag Manager that could potentially help with tracking with Google Analytics. The Google Tag Manager is a main hub for any tracking code that you want to add to your website including Google Ads Sense and Facebook Pixel.
3) The Google Analytics provide a very extensive tool for companies to know a lot about the users. They can even track different activities that the user perform from the website including whether they view search results, item list and promotions.

 

As an exercise of this project, I have worked on moving Google Analytics Account from LAITS to LAITS CMS in order to make it easy for a user group to access it.

 

STA Orientation:  Welcome  Isaiah Thomas

Started on: April 21, 2023

Completed on: April 21, 2023

Description: For this orientation, I got to introduce myself and the objectives of Web and Design STA. I also walked him through Github training to clone a repository onto his local machine.

 

 

 

Project Google Analytics

Started on: April 21, 2023

Staff Guidance: Stacy

Description: For this project, I needed to check if a website has google analytics or not. So I need to go to each website to install Site Kit and check if there is an existing Google Analytics Account associated with the website or not. If not, then the next step of this project is to actually create and link it to the website.

 

UTFC Studio Testing

Project: Backdrop Color Testing
Notes: Since UTFC plans on recording its lectures this summer, I had the opportunity to go inside the recording studio to test backdrops for the lecturer. It was a cool and fun moment to get a hands-on experience with the other side of this assignment! I could see the backdrops in real time and edit them to the correct display such as altering contrast and saturation inside Photoshop.

 

 

UTFC Greenscreen Edits

Project: Greenscreen Image Sourcing
Due On: April 20th
Notes: A handful of STAs were tasked with finding royalty-free images and uploading them into a PowerPoint. As a team, our responsibility is to insert the correct copyright info into a Spreadsheet our Art Director, Maddy, had made. Overall, I found the process therapeutic and gives a means to paying attention to detail when finding images.

 

 

UTFC Title Card Edits

Project: PowerPoint Title Card Replacement
Due On: April 19th
Notes: Since I had helped with studio backdrop testing for modules 3 and 4, I was responsible for updating the greenscreens title cards. For the title slide, to replace the background photo with the new backdrop photo, we had to the Corrections tab and select Brightness -40% while also covering the LAITS Studio logo.

 

Week 14

Project: More Psych Lab Migrations!

 

Project: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab Website

Client/Prof: Department of Psychology

Started on: April, 2023

Completion status: Complete

Staff guidance: Stacy Vlasits, Marianne

Description/plans: Move more content from the current existing lab website to an updated theme.

 

Thought that the Chruch-Lang lab was the last website I was going to migrate? Well you thought wrong. There are multiple psych websites that still need to be migrated since a lot of them are using outdated templates and logos. The David Buss lab, is the next site that I will be migrating and there are many more psych lab sites! All of these sites are part of a multi-site on Word Press.  A multisite is a cluster of websites under the same dashboard that are managed/maintained by the same people. So at the moment I am a superadmin for all of these psychology lab sites T-T.

This is what the current David Buss lab website looks like:

You can take a look at it here.

 

I am going to move all the content of this site into the template that I previously posted about that Marianne made once again. The workflow for this task is to make a clone of the new template and just save/copy all the photos, elements, and content from the previous website into it. This is fairly simple in hindsight but sites can have a ton of content and moving everything over can actually be quite tedious. After the first migration I did last week, this one was much simpler. Because of WP’s very block modular layout across most of its themes, I could copy and paste block elements instead of have to photo each photo or paragraph one by one in the website. Another thing is making sure all the component look good and respond well in the new template.

 

Two of the pages I spent the most time on were the Books  and Graduate Students (Current lab members) pages. This was mostly because I have to download the images and resize them so that the layout of the page would look cleaner and so that all elements would have the same dimensions.

 

The home page is also a challenge since I’m attempting to replicate the look of it in the original website while also making it responsive.

 

This is one of the first ways I layout the cover image and the books out. I thought it was sort of awkward looking, all the books were different sizes and they did align with the cover image. To top it off the cover image was just oddly large and while it have have fit that mid-2000s vibe in the original, it’s not cutting it in 2023.

 

This is what I decided on (picture below). I cropped the height of the cover image and made it wider and also cropped/resized all the books images so that they would be the same dimensions. I used a lot of containers to accomplish this, all the the slot where the books are in are containers. Check it out here

Week LXXI

STA Presentation

This rearranged my schedule a lot last week, the presentation itself went great! The only other assets I worked on (Marissa did the lower thirds final versions) was this grid for the intro animation, which I made a standardized template for first.

EDIT: oops, I already covered the grid last week.

 

French Textbook

Finally back on this! There’s been a lot of interesting cases, especially the numbers and calendar-related vocab. For one set of numbers, I was cropping into a scrapbook style.

For another, I got to make some original graphics to match the format of birthday candles.

GOV 306C Backdrops

Project: GOV 306C Backdrops
Client: GOV 306
Completion status: started April 13th
Staff guidance: Maddy
Description/plans: For the digital backdrop, the professor wanted something similar to the vertical backdrop we use in GOV 310, and similar to the day stage background panels. The campus/tower pictures had to be desaturated and have a color overlay/color gradient to match the tan/sepia tone.

• Going into the studio to test the backdrop appearance was super fun! I hope I get to test more backdrops in the future:0
• I also learned to be wary of cropping/logos because they can be cut out or cropped differently than how we think they might appear.

 

 

GOV 306C cont’d…

Canvas Dashboard and Homepage Banners