Website process: challenges/obstacles

Currently, I am done with all of the website except for the project pages. These will be a work in progress until the DH project concludes (whenever and however that happens) as I check the spreadsheet recording all student responses to the proposal form. This has changed since last week as last week I was monitoring the blog and designing the structure for the "main" project page. In the next week or two, I need to edit the page continually as responses appear, and continue to communicate with students about their projects in regards to the site.

The most major challenge has been communicating. It is difficult to design the structure for something that will be filled and changed by someone else's work, and so I found what I thought was the best way to handle it: provide a page that links to every indiv. project, then allow everyone almost total free reign over their own page. However, in order to set up the page, I need certain information, and I have trouble with that. Many people have submitted descriptions that don't quite work--are written in the wrong tense (ex. "I will be making x project" instead of "x project is y") or express uncertainty over the specifics--and I either have to edit them or relay back to Ms. Smith that their writers need to re-write their description. This is just one example of ways in which it's difficult to communicate with a large group of people.

My solution is that... there isn't one. There isn't any one-size-fits all. The best solution, I've found, is to accept that this is going to be a little messy, a little chaotic, instead of perfectly controlled and maintained, which is what I'd love it to be. Sometimes the communication happens by addressing multiple Google meets, sometimes I relay information through Ms. Smith, sometimes I email or text the student individually. It can feel like putting scotch tape over a cracked sidewalk, but it works as well as it possibly could: the website works, it's beginning to fill up with blog posts and projects, and I take it one day at a time.

A technical challenge I've been facing has been that in order to maintain the format that I've chosen for the "main" page, which I consider to be the best both organization-wise and intuition-wise, requires all three "blocks" to be up. I can't, as I'd wanted, easily hide the unused blocks until they were used. I decided to simply write in "project under construction" and publish the site with it that way. Though I find it grating--at the beginning of the project, I waited to publish until the last second, after I'd polished the website--it's the most efficient solution.

Otherwise, though, I've been lucky to find almost no obstacles in the web design, and it's been a fairly straightforward, point A to point B to point C process. I'm excited to see how everyone's projects will look once they begin to translate their project from word documents or what have you to the site!