Dara Fillmore
5 March 2014
Century America
Contract Proposal for Website
Project Site:  http://uwsuperior.centuryamerica.org/

 

Mission Statement:

Century America’s UW-Superior page will invite anyone who stumbles onto the site, or searches for the history of the area, to engage with the Great War by experiencing virtually what citizens of the day would have experienced. The goal of this site is to share historical data and knowledge in a way that will communicate area history to the general public or the skilled historian. Housing photo galleries, videos about the process, news from local papers, and other documentation, this website will allow visitors to learn summary knowledge or dig deeper to learn more about the Twin Ports area during World War I.

Structure:

The structure of my website is sort of fluid at this point, but I will attempt to explain what it looks like in my head.

Static Front Page:

• Offering information about the site: overview of focus,content

• Relates or links to other Century America sites

• Gives the logos of the various organizations involved

• Has a cool photo of Old Main (the only building on campus for quite a while) or of Superior servicemen

Next Page:

This page will hopefully be the navigation feature (the second page) of the site, leading visitors to click on the various things housed on the site that are of interest to them. Once the visitor clicks into the site, there will be various boxes or photos or images to click on depending on the topic of interest:

• UW-Superior History (General- Old Main fire 1914, school catalogs, school names)

 

• UW-Superior History (War Effort – gardens, enlisters, yearbooks)

• Superior History During the Great War (Newspaper articles, war events, poems)

• Duluth/Twin Ports History During the Great War (Shipping, Park Point Bridge, airplanes, service men, Labor News, Duluth news)

• Other Local Happenings – Voices of the Great War section (Two men tarred/feathered, one possibly killed [or committed suicide], price lists, granary amounts, locals and their trips)

• Influenza (Superior Telegram article early on, St. Paul papers on flu, ?student year book)

• General Impacts of the Great War on this Area (economic conditions, war effort, propaganda, postwar)

 

Section on Enlisted Men:

• Who served

• Who died and whether it was from battle or from influenza

• Any photos I can find of servicemen

 

Photo Gallery:

• Summaries with each photo

• Where to find actual photos

• Thumbnail photos that when clicked will enlarge to show detail

• Possibly a video slideshow feature with commentary?

  • The photos I’ve been looking at are mostly of the school and a few of the town. I also have many photos of the documents I will be working through – student yearbook entries about the war, catalog descriptions of normal school classes, stories from the newspaper about the school and the war. . .

 

Timeline:

• This will probably be its own page unless I can get it to fit naturally into another page

• Big events in area history, or

• Events in history of UW-Superior (name changes, involvement in war effort, school news or local news involving the university)

 

Interactive:

• Comments section?

• Additional information to add (other historical documents, etc. from website visitors) If visitors have more information on a topic and would like to share it, I thought that creating some type of form to fill out and email would let people have a role in adding to the website

• Something with audio for some sections? This may meld into the vlog idea, but I thought that reading a few things – newspaper articles, catalog descriptions, war poems – and recording them in audio for people to click and listen might be neat. I just thought it would be a way to make things more accessible and more interactive than just looking at everything and reading it oneself

• Photos from then and now (may not work since there wasn’t much here as far as a campus beside one dorm and Old Main back then)

• There are quite a few older buildings around Superior that I could probably do a then and now section on if it seems to fit into the website

 

Credits Page:

• Vlog on process of creating the site (or screen shots of website during construction, me researching in archives, working on photos, attending class sessions)

• Bio of me or of the whole course (this may go on overall page) (if any articles are published about this course, they could be linked here)

• Organizations that made the site possible by allowing use of materials, helping with research

• Logos of organizations involved (maybe here as well as on static page)

• Link to course blog?

• Archival page of links to everything known to man on the Great War and the Twin Ports area (annotated bibliography for historians). Some entries may or may not be included in the website, so I will attempt to differentiate between a “further reading” page, and a “Sources Used” page. I think to keep the page public – friendly, I will put most of the notes and bibliographic stuff on its own page, but if I find a way to put small print under some things, that might work as well.

 

Construction Tools:

• WordPress

  • Themes I like:

    • Adamos by danstriker

    • Displace by Awesomello

    • Enrichmg by enricchi (trying this out on my blog right now)

      • With the picture in my head, I want to use a theme that is accessible and easy to navigate, but looks new and nice at the same time. I will probably end up with a different one than these, but these have features I like.

 

• Possible Plug-ins:

  • Social Media Feather (to let people share things from this site)

  • GSspeech (text to speech for accessibility)

  • Responsive Column Widgets (for easier navigation)

  • Featured Articles Lite (for aesthetics)

 

• TimelineJS

 

• If editing is needed:

  • Gimp (Photo)

  • Adobe Premier Elements (Video)

  • Maybe the Vlog software: http://obsproject.com/

  • Create tags and keywords for searches?

 

• And some other tools, as needed or thought of. . .

Deadlines:

March

7 – Send photos to Jack (1 or 2 that represent the college during the Great War). Also send a more recent photo.

14 – Finish timeline of important dates to share for the overall timeline. Send along a few of the dates and images to the UMW group for the overall timeline

17 – Most of the college pages finished

21 – Most of the community pages finished

23 – Finalize sections and add in things that didn’t work yet

25 – Rough idea of the website created

April

3 – First decent draft of site finished

14 – Working through the pages and overall accessibility and look of site – trying it out on friends and family members to see what works and what doesn’t

24 — Site finished!

29 — Any final touches to site/changes from professors/things I just randomly thought of or remembered

May

1 – WEBSITE DONE, presentations, papers