Genevieve and I are really excited to start working on our website covering the censorship debate we chose! Neither of us have done anything like this using technology, and we are interested in learning how to use all of our resources as we go. As English majors, we have a handle on the type of content we want to put in our website, however the visual and technological nature of this project is going to be a fun challenge.

How the Site Will Look

In WordPress, we chose the parabola theme. We want our website to have multiple tools for navigation, and the theme allows us to choose where we want them. We can link to our social media accounts if we choose to do that, which gives anyone on the site a quick way to contact us. I am interested in the idea of having a scrolling header on our home screen, which is what the theme example had. It would be an easy way to display some our major pages, such as our page detailing the case, and our page giving context about young adult literature and it’s history of censorship. There are a lot of really cool ways to organize the site that we will explore.

I’m really excited about the idea of a “Key Players” page. Almost all of the pages on the site will connect to it. It will be a really good place for us to share blog posts and primary sources that we have. I would really like to use one of the sidebars in our theme to have all of the people listed, so that they can be found at anytime.

Outside of WordPress

We both strongly agree that a TimelineJS is going to be a great tool for us in creating our site. Since the case is so influential, we will have, not only the events of the case, but also dates where people have talked about it on the news, or wrote about it in books. Karin Perry and Ellen Hopkins both blogged about the events, and we could link those there.

We also found newspapers.com to be a really helpful tool that we would like to use in our website. Copyright might be more of an issue with this, but I think we could upload small sections of the articles to be both informative, and show the relevance of the case. I have thought about doing a StoryMapJS over an article to add another interactive feature, but we would have to workshop the idea.

There are a lot of infograph makers available on the internet that we might chose to use in our website. LucidPress seems like it would be easy to use to help build our own graphics for the site.

Charging Ahead

After doing this survey, Genevieve and I both discovered that we have more of a grasp on this technology thing than we thought we did! There are a lot of resources out there that are user friendly, and will help us to present all of the facts about our case that are available in a user friendly and visually appealing way.