Week 10 Project Update

[CarolineMcDonough]

Week 10 Update

During this week's meeting, we discussed the main page of our website (and the personal blurbs that might appear there), the option of dropping stories from the repository, and the creation of the reading view.

Main Page Blurbs

We discussed the general design and content of the website this week, and took some time to focus specifically on the landing/home page. In keeping with the standard way websites like ours have been set up for projects in the past, we agreed that the page should contain a brief introductory summary of our project and its goals, alongside individual "bio blurbs" from each of us, detailing who we are, our class year, our majors, and our reasons for taking the class, alongside any other information we might elect to add. These blurbs will be written individually, and have a soft deadline for our next meeting (which, due to thanksgiving break, is two weeks out).

Dropping Stories

Due to a mix of communication and merge conflict issues, we found ourselves behind our planned level of markup readiness for the meeting this week. Because of this, we opted to drop several stories, which will no longer appear in our repo or our final project (although, because of the predictable nature of the documents given the schema, these stories could be reviewed and re-added at a later date, beyond the scope of the semester, if we desired). These changes will be solidified and implemented shortly, so as to allow our group's attention to be focused on generating the other content for the website.

Reading View

Among that content— and arguably the most important facet of the project— is our reading view. During this week's meeting, we examined each of our XSLT 6 assignments (which had asked us to create practice reading views for projects) and discussed the features that we'd each chosen to include. The few that we liked best, and therefore those which will certainly make it into the final version of the view, are as follows:

• Checkable boxes that allow the features of the text, whether color or formatting, to be toggled by the user
  • These boxes already appear on the "dummy" reading view page, but don't yet do anything when clicked. We will link those boxes to the formatting of the reading view
• Hover-text (aka alt text) that appears when a user hovers their mouse over a given action or quote
  • This allows us to communicate some overarching ideas like gender with color and emphasis, while allowing specific information (like names) to appear attached to their appropriate content yet only appear if a user wants them to
• Visual styling in the form of retaining the background image of the story menu page, but blurring it out to reduce visual noise and direct focus to the panels with toggle options and story text

This reading view will be primarily designed by @AlyssaUnderwood and myself (@CarolineMcDonough) by group agreement, though we will collaborate with Rory (@rwal67) who will focus on generating digital art visuals for the site as well as @Sean-Shmulevich who has been focusing on the functional code and layout of the site.

[mmcclenahan84]

When reading this response I focused on the reading view section because it is arguably the most important aspect of the project as that's where people will be spending the majority of the time on your project. I think you bring up some great additions to your website that will enhance the experience, and overall just make it look nicer. From what I have seen on the current website and what you plan on implementing, I am excited to see the final product!