It appears that our site is complete, apart from perhaps a few tweaks that may take place. We decided on the name "Keeping It Local" because "Keeping Sonoma Sustainable" was a bit of a tongue twister. Below is what the home page looks like:
I checked with Tucker the day the project was due to see if I could make some edits over the weekend to the product completed by the group in class. Predictably I changed a lot of things from what the groups had done...particularly with the design aspect. The photo below is what the design team had chosen for a background which made it look very chaotic.
Along with that, they had chosen a photo of grains for the header, mixing very poorly with the peppers. The pinkish page background was tan and the text and photos were falling off the page. Overall it was a disaster. Part of me wishes I had a before/after photo for you, but I actually really did not want to take a photo before because it was so ugly.
A lot of smaller things were changed on the design side by me: fonts, colors, pages, etc. I guess you could say I was slightly disappointed by what the design team had come up with. Luckily I was able to work on it quite a bit and get it to where it is now. Personally I think it has a soft, inviting look. It is colorful, yet not crazy, and easily accessible.
This is how the map turned out. It can be easily enlarged, and information comes up about each farm when selected. The map was the one aspect of the project where I did not really need to get involved. The products, maps, and photography teams definitely came together well with this one, creating an excellent piece of content. One idea brought up by other classmates was that it would be interesting to implement a way for viewers to find specific foods more easily. Currently they can filter by type of farm, but not, for example, if they want to just buy carrots. Additional layers would have to be added to the map, and I am not entirely sure that Google Maps allows you to do that, but if possible it would be something very helpful to add to the map down the road.
Next was the articles page, which I exclusively designed. I wish we had more articles on the site right now, but I think it could definitely expand over the years if students continued to write pieces.
Then we have the "Ask Ashley" column which I have had nothing to do with - Ashley and her crew have been working on this and I know nothing about it. This was the only aspect of the site that may have had some coding involved...one of the members of the design team claimed he coded all of this, yet there are simple ways to do this on Wix so I do not know for sure. The student also said he coded many other aspects that were not actually coded, so it is hard to know for sure.
The media section contains a variety of works from members not exclusively in the website group. This includes lesson plans for students, info graphics, etc. Again, I am hoping this area will expand as students produce different works over the years.
The last major page is the about page, which describes the project and its members. It was difficult to edit this page, because it contains descriptions of each students' jobs, and some of them are not totally truthful. Because in reality many of the jobs were taken over my people such as myself (and mostly myself) when the members were not working up to par. However, this was just something that had to be accepted, and hopefully now that I know each classmate more, future projects will work out better. I can definitely say that I learned a lot about organization with this project, and it certainly felt like a real work environment with needing to hold others accountable for their works. I really hope that "Keeping it Local" will expand significantly and help Sonoma grow more sustainable.
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