Our goal for turning in the first draft was to have all of our pages finished. We did not want to leave anything out, that way the rest of the semester can be spent perfecting anything our peers point out.

Technical Difficulties

As I have said before, I am not the most technologically advanced person in the world. Genevieve and I originally really liked how user friendly a website called Venngage was for that exact purpose. Neither of us had ever created an info graphic before, preferring generally to stick to the writing part of technical writing. Sadly, venngage turned out to be anything but user friendly.

I emailed Leah last week, frantic, because no matter what I tried, I could not get either of our graphics to show up on the site. She installed a plug in for us that still didn’t work. She tried something else that appeared to work from her end, but when I tried to do, it only showed up about half the time.

We were really sad to scrap our graphics, but we had no choice but to start over.

Learning to Use Google Sheets

Since I was working on the page of our site about Norman, Oklahoma and the schools, I knew that I wanted to include relevant information about the people who lived there. I had all of the data, but no knowledge of how to put it in a spreadsheet in the correct form. Eventually, I figured it out, and made three graphs that match our theme. I’m really proud of myself for them.

During this process, I actually feel like I became relatively fluent at embedding things into word press. Besides the actual writing, I was able to play around with the site and make it look exactly the way I wanted it.

Learning by Being Stubborn

There were some little problems with the layout of the website that honestly made me want to throw my computer against a wall. One really dumb one was the fact that WordPress does not automatically register an empty text box on the actual website. I finally figured out (after immense internet searching) that all you have to do is press control+enter.

I love buttons. There are probably 20 buttons on our website because they are exactly what I was looking for. I was so happy when Leah showed us how to use them in class, because I genuinely would never have figured it out.

Overall I am just really proud of the website Genevieve and I have been able to create together. It was not intuitive to me, considering how long I struggled every time we needed to use Google Sheets. However, I think this experience so far has been invaluable, and I can’t to see what everyone else thinks of our website.

Check it out here!