And all of a sudden, it's come together...

Over the course of the semester I've posted about how I thought I was understanding things in class and how frustrated I was when I realized that in the comfort of my own home/office/futon I couldn't for the life of me make what I thought I'd learned work. Well, within the past two weeks, something has clicked. All of a sudden my mental block has evaporated. I see clearly, I link style sheets with ease, and I've been able to apply what I've learned at my job. Can you believe it? I'm actually the resident web design expert at my internship (okay, not Study Abroad...we've got professionals over there, but at the College Learning Center). I realize that it might sound crazy--I've been enrolled in a web design class for what, 9 weeks now and I'm the resident expert? Well let me tell you, when you have a staff of 3 and two of them don't know the first thing about creating a webpage, you're in business! So, I took it upon myself to create some (simple) style sheets and post the tutoring schedule at the CLC online for all students to access. This online posting had originally been done by someone in the advising center (and we hadn't had access to our own website...ahhh the bureaucracy...) but since his departure, we've finangled our way to the World Wide Web. Anyway, enough back story, as of Friday, March 31 (I'll document it because it's quite a momentous occasion) I have created my first functional website for all the world to view. I am especially proud because, not only is this one actual and useful, but I used a lot of the skills that we've discussed in class. In addition to using style sheets, I created a table, linked several different pages within the site, and manipulated the links so that they would appear on the actual CAS Learning Center site (while we've managed to get our hands on the schedule sites, we can't actually make any changes on the main CLC site. Baby steps people, baby steps.) To top it off, as I was creating the site, I was considering many of the cognitive load theories that we've discussed in class. I realized how important it was to make the site dynamic by allowing students to select a specific topic rather than only allowing them to view the entire schedule. I created a table because it allowed the information to be orderly, and I relied on style sheets to make the pages consistent.

In my excitement to create the page, there are some things that I overlooked and that I'll have to go back and improve. For example, I didn't create a link back to the index page from each of the subject specific pages and as a result, the user has to rely on the browser's navigational tools rather than internal links. Additionally, I hadn't taken into account the way that different browsers would present the information and, while I probably won't make any changes at this point in the game, it's interesting to see how different something as simple as a table appears in Firefox versus Internet Explorer (neither of which look like the Dreamweaver view).

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the practical application of the skills that I've developed so far. Don't get me wrong, the site that I've created for the CLC is super simple and could be taken much further, but the fact that I'm able to see what to do next, identify how to improve the work, and understand how and why what I do in Dreamweaver is represented online is very satisfying. Woo!