After reviewing our contract in relation to our finished website, I would say that we met the majority of our goals. For points we were not able to meet exactly, I would say that our alternatives usually satisfied the same goals, or that they otherwise worked in service to our overarching design objectives.
We aspired to create a site which maximized visual diversity and interactivity, but not at the cost of readability or accessibility. While our initial estimate of “one or more visuals per section/subsection” proved to be overambitious, major sections did make use of consistent visuals and embedded tools. In some instances, we actually avoided including visuals as a stylistic decision. Our “home” section, and some parent pages like “the cases” or “‘real witchcraft’ in the 21st century,” were intended to be simple and direct. At one point, we considered incorporating buttons to link to each individual section of our site on our homepage, but decided that it would ultimately be an unnecessary feature, and that it might undermine the sequence of each section in our header menu, which we felt was intuitive. Sections which were dependent on context relied heavily on user engagement, making use of short video clips, clickable content, framing questions, and the expectation of user input to personally connect the user to the social and religious context of the Mallory case. Our use of aesthetics was consistent throughout the site, a point which came up repeatedly in peer review. We doubled down on this idea by limiting the use of bright colors on our site where possible.
Our division of labor did function mostly according to the terms of our contract. I was primarily responsible for the home page, context pages, and the formatting of the “about us” section, while Olivia worked almost exclusively on the “cases,” “Harry Potter in the US,” and “Additional materials” sections as well as interview transcription. The one exception to our contract in this regard was Olivia’s “incorporation of primary/secondary sources” task, which we pursued individually while working on each of our sections. Point of contact responsibilities and equipment management were mostly irrelevant, though Olivia did satisfy our space for a second interviewee in the form of Dana Kling. On a similar note, our expected list of digital tools did prove effective, with the exception of Thinglink which we replaced with Genially, a free alternative which ended up contributing some needed variety, and Visme, which was made irrelevant by Genially.
Our expected page arrangement went through some significant revisions which were often the result of changes to our overarching project goals, as well as developments in our understanding of the case. As we began to develop a clearer focus on the correlation between censorship and fundamentalism, we cut some extraneous material, and as we experimented with WordPress and received commentary, we found more effective ways to arrange and divide certain pages. Some changes to our pages were superficial, like framing a page on Caryl Matrisciana as “perceptions” of Wicca, while others were substantive, like substituting a “case outcome” section for a less holistic “significance” section.
Our least successful contract element was undoubtedly our expected timeframe. Producing a rough outline of our completed site took well over our target date of April 8th. This led to further complications regarding our other deadlines, particularly our April 12th copyright review and April 22nd peer review. In general, I attribute this to circumstances outside of class, but also to issues with accessibility, which slowed the process of acquiring sources and often compelled us to change the direction and scope of our project.