Project History
Working on this project for the past three months has been challenging for me, especially when it came to designing a complete website. Nevertheless, it has been a very beneficial experience as I came to engage with the life and work of Cronelia Sorabji while working on my One More Voice satellite project. The process of creating and developing my websites while simultaneously working on the course requirements made me see the project take its final shape gradually.
The course assignments had contributed greatly to this process since they are the project's foundation. The class discussions and platform presentations had also influenced my work since all the students in the ENGL877 "Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities" class had tested multiple website-development platforms and provided others with adequate reviews and feedback. Consequently, the collaboration between the students in this class is certainly one of the most important factors that made working on my project a positive experience.
The flexibility of the course provided us with enough space to experiment with different website-development platforms and to think outside the box. Dr. Adrian Wisnicki asked us to experiment with and use and review Mobirise and Wordpress. He also gave us the chance to look for other platforms and choose the ones we prefer using. Initially, I liked Mobirise and decided to make it my main platform. I also planned to connect it to other platforms that would contain some parts of the project. These included Webnode and Wix.
After spending a few weeks developing my project materials and incorporating them into my main and secondary websites, I decided to use Wix to create my main website instead of using Mobirise. I did that for a couple of reasons. The first was that I realized Wix was more flexible than Mobirise in terms of template designs. Secondly, Mobirise became occasionally unresponsive in terms of publishing some pages and inaccessible through the phone web browser. After some discussions with two of my classmate, I was reminded that publishing the Mobirise website works better when done through the Github option that the platform provides. I opted to focus on Wix and eliminate Mobirise from my project structure.
After deciding to create my main website using Wix, I started working on the design and organization of the multiple pages I created. I also dedicated my Webnode website to the course assignments as a documentation of my journey while working on my project in order to share with the user the processes through which the content of the website and the digital side of things were developed. Regardless of Wix's user friendliness, the shift in my plans was a time-consuming process as I was not as familiar with Wix as I was with Mobirise and I had few days left to finish working on my project.
There were also other intricate details that were important to me. For instance, opening external URLs in new tabs was my intended plan for external links. However, after Dr. Wisnicki noted to us that opening new tabs is an accessibility issue, I redesigned the pages and the redirected the external URLs so that they open in the same tab. It was important to know about such a criterion of accessibility and how some users might be distracted by the automatic opening of new tabs. This instance also confirmed the notion that we should always take such details into consideration when we create and develop our DH projects. Overall, I believe that what I have learned in this class will be very beneficial for my future as a student who is now more interested in the field of digital humanities.