Ayleen Lindahl
May 12, 2002

The Making of The Storyboard

The Storyboard was a project that was begging me to bring to life. I had old stories from when I was younger calling my name and I had the incredible urge to put them on the web, but never really found a way to do it, until now. I also had many words written in various books that I thought were personally funny and I wanted to share them. There were many other things begging to be put up on a site and I finally found a way to do it by placing all my “English” type material onto a single site.

The first stage consisted of finding all my material and separating it into different categories. I knew that I wanted to place all my new stories, essays and poems onto a single section and then have my older works presented in another. This way, the person navigating through my site would not get confused over the styles of writing from past to present.

The next thing I did was to make a template for all my pages. I wanted to have the banner and page name along the top, the selective arrows that I thought would give me more control of where the person would be going next. The menu along the top is used when I have more than one work for a section and I want to try and let them go from page to page, like in a hypertext essay. I did include menus along the left so that they could skip around, but I made it harder, in my opinion, for them to get back to the very front menu (The Storyboard). This makes it a little easier to have the reader get lost in the site, and maybe find a few surprises that he/she was not expecting.

I did want images, and the large ones along the right are where I would place them. I know some people saw the purple color and thought it was a bit off for a site, but with the kind of material I am presenting, I thought it to be a complimentary color. The purple shouldn’t be too much of a problem, as I have used it throughout the site and not deviated from that, also kept the background a white color, which I just remembered will be grey if I don’t go in there and specify that color. (Hopefully I will get that fixed in time.) The images I made for my menu along the top were fun to devise as I made an ordinary button/arrow and had used a layer effect to make the colors. Then, after saving that, I went in and swirled the picture to make the effect I wanted. When these were both saved, I slapped the arrow into the Dreamweaver program, did a swap-image behavior with “mouse” over. I did a similar presentation with my “Art work” link, where I took my art and placed it onto a 300X300 pixel clean image, selected a color from the art and filled it in. then, with layer effects, I did a splash look around the border and did it to each and every piece of art.

I do notice that I have what could be essentially called splash pages. When you select “Older Works” you will go on to a page where the menus is along the left and all I have really is an image I made and a description of the section of this site along the bottom. I would take this page out and have the “Older Works” link go right to “Topper” but I feel that it helps with understanding my writing with my text along the splash pages’ bottom.

I have a link in “Current Works” that I believe I will take out. I haven’t had time to repurpose the papers I wrote in “Class Papers”. I would like to do that and a few modifications before keeping that link there. The papers were the 7-10 page reports that I thought were interesting, but are laborous to read when in this sort of format.

All in all, I had fun working on this site. It has taken a lot of time to get just what I have now, but I would like to expand on the site as I go through college, keep making adjustments and adding more sections as I go. I had many other stories from my older works collection, but I have to re-type it all since I do not have the discs, but the hard copies in a large folder.