In my last post, I talked about themes, screen size, proportions, and looking at other lab’s websites to understand what our site should have.

The new website is complete. In my last post, I talked about themes, screen size, proportions, and looking at other lab’s websites to understand what our site should have. Everything from the theme to the minute aesthetic details have been critiqued and fixed, through the help of my lab mates. By getting a range of different opinions, I was able to ensure that each stylistic choice I made helped viewers navigate through the site.

While making some of the edits, I found that I needed to further personalize the slider plugin that I was using, as the design was misleading and made the content hard to understand. There are a plethora of photo gallery plugins available for free, which allowed me to chose an option that allowed for long captions, adjustable photo dimensions, and font manipulations. Previously, I was using Next Gen Gallery. Although this plugin did allow for long captions, I was forced to make changes to the base files. Although this is allowed in this specific plugin (for most other plugins, viewing the source code is alright, but editing it is not), when the plugin undergoes an update, all of my changes would be lost.

For these reasons, I switched to Smooth Slider. This plugin allows for long captions. For the font changes, I used CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

My next steps are to deploy the website onto the server, and teach all of my lab mates how to log in and write their future blog posts.

This fall, I will be a sophomore, and I hope to continue to excel in my classes and in the lab.