The end of the road

Well I've reached the end of the first half of my internship and I can easily say that it lived up to my expectations and exceeded some. I was able to put my own ideas into each of the websites combined with the guidance of all of my superiors. I was also able to make some changes to each of the sites to increase the level of functionality for users. Thank you to everyone that made this experience enjoyable for me!

Legacy conversion/new template for website

The Legacy has fully converted to using the website for distributing their articles rather than using PDF files. This has proven to be a much more efficient way for articles to be published. On another note, Ms. Oster approached me recently and said that the E-Commerce I & II classes will be creating templates for the Apex website and if one of them seems suitable for the site, we will implement it. This should be a very challenging task if the plan the goes through, because every page on the site would need to be redesigned again.

New template for Apex site

Recently, WCPSS told all of the schools that there had to be a small picture displaying the new assignment plans for the 2012-13 school year and it must be displayed on the homepage of every school's website. Our website already had a bunch of small pictures that are links to other websites on our homepage. So Ms. Oster approached me and asked me to change the layout of the template by moving all of the picture links to the left side of the news feed, and keep all of the text links to the right of the feed. At first, this task seemed easy. But as I dug deeper and deeper into the code and how it was laid out, I discovered that this would be difficult. I had a temporary fix developed and tested it out. It had a few bugs but was workable. At this point, the new template wasn't ready to be released to the Internet, but I accidentally sent it to the local servers. This, in turn, temporarily made Apex's website incapable of use. So I had to be quick on my feet (and hands you could say). I had to find a stable version of the template that we had saved. I quickly applied it to the site while I tried to fix the new template. I had to stay late for about an hour to sort out the mess I had caused. After a long hour of tests and code reconstruction I finally found a solution that worked. I applied it to the site and reuploaded the entire site, which took a good 20 minutes, and we finally had our new school website launched. Close call!

Legacy finished

Finally finished the Legacy's website. The template is basically a copy of the Apex template with a few color changes and logo changes. I have also created a PDF document that fully explains how to edit the website for the Legacy. The site's code is set up to be the most user-friendly it can possibly be.

Legacy progress

I've made progress with the Legacy website but it is still has a ways to go before completion. Creating a template for the website is definitely the hardest part. I've been working on it from my home computer and playing around with a few ideas to see what will works best. I hope to have it completed by mid-November. This is definitely the hardest task I've had so far.

LED board software/Staff listing update

I've been having a few issues with the software that updates the LED software. It's not a big problem but it is very tedious and sometimes aggravating. When I create new slides with information, sometimes the slide won't save and when I try to reopen it to edit it again, it's gone. On other rare occasions, I will get an error box saying I'm not allowed to type any more text on this slide, even though I've typed one or two words at max. These problems only come up every once in a while so it's not a huge issue, but an update to the software could benefit future webmasters. Also, on the Apex website we have a page with all of the staff listed. It has their last name, first name, department, and email address. To help users view the page easier, I've added a feature that allows visitors to sort the table by any of the four categories listed. I've also added <a name> tags which allows the user to click on a letter of the alphabet (which is already listed on the page) and the browser will immediately jump to the staff members with that letter of the alphabet.

New website #2

I was again approached by someone else who needed a website for use. Mrs. Knall asked me if I could create a website for the Apex Legacy to use. They currently publish their articles through PDF files and, in turn, I post them on the Apex High website. They wanted to change this process so that they, themselves, could post their articles without the help of a webmaster. This task was difficult because I now have to create a website that runs off of the same software and local server that the school's website uses. This is still a work in progress.