When I first began my internship with the FITlife Project, I knew that there was a slight possibility of me doing some work on web designing for the group, but I did not fully understand the extent to which I would be needed until the start of my first couple weeks. Although I have taken a web development course in college that taught me HTML and CSS, I wasn’t entirely sure that I felt comfortable inheriting the task of completely reworking their website and managing it over the summer. For that reason, my second learning objective was to become a more proficient and confident web designer. Despite my very limited technical understanding of web development at the start of my internship, through research, communication with my site supervisor, and experimentation, I now feel much more confident in my abilities as my internship comes to a close.

            Struggling to find some work to do earlier on in my time with the FITlife Project, I confronted my site supervisor about the possibility of managing their website for some additional hours. Intrigued by my request, Nick had me look at their site, critique it, and write up a brief recommendation for what I thought needed to be done. After looking at it, conducting some research, and considering several options, I wrote back to Nick recommending the pursuit of a more responsive design. Such an option would ultimately enable their site to function on computers as well as mobile devices, which I considered to be a very important component for the future of web development. In addition, the FITlife Project’s website was a bit cluttered and not aesthetically strong, so I also recommended a clean, minimalist design with plenty of whitespace, citing several large websites like Facebook, YouTube, Google, and Apple that embrace such a mentality. Beyond that, I recommended a few minor changes regarding the appearance of the site, permalinks used, and a more organized way to display blog posts. Recognizing and agreeing with several of the points I made, Nick essentially gave me the “green light” to spearhead a total reworking of their website.

            Since the website was hosted on WordPress, I spent several hours researching recommendations, themes, and plugins to assist me in the completion of my vision. After quickly deciding on a theme called “Responsive,” I installed it and began changing the design of the website. For instance, whereas the home page had previously featured a definitive display of every post ever made to the site, I decided to reduce the home page’s contents to merely the navigation bar, a picture, a one-sentence description of the FITlife Project, and a few widgets containing a link to the five latest posts, links to an blog archive broken down by each month, a search bar, and a link to the FITlife Project’s Facebook page. In addition, one major task involved in the redesign of the website was to fix up the disorganized “Meet the FITlife Team” page. Before I undertook the task of redesigning the site, this particular page did not have a grid and was not properly lined up. However, after researching various solutions, I managed to find a plugin called “Connections,” which not only provided a clean grid, but also allowed for the easy insertion of additional data.

            Despite the ease of implementing several of these components to the website, I came across a number of troubling obstacles as a result of some of my limited technical knowledge. The largest of these obstacles involved displaying the entire blog for posts associated with a specific category to one page (i.e. the pages for “Special Warriors” and “Workouts”). After researching the problem for several hours, I learned one of the most important things through my experience with the website: when stuck on a problem, don’t be afraid to ask for help. Once I confronted my site supervisor about the dilemma, he pointed me to a web designer named Jonathan Heyman, who was instrumental in guiding me through some of the backend PHP coding that enabled a specific category to be posted to a page in its entirely. In addition, Jonathan answered a few other questions that I had regarding the site, such as paginating the “Special Warriors” and “Workouts” pages to reduce loading time.

            Beyond the core work of redesigning the FITlife Project website, as I have previously mentioned, I also inherited the task of managing content uploaded to the site. Given the large amount of videos posted to the “Special Warriors” page, this also entailed running the FITlife Project’s YouTube account. From this experience, I learned how valuable it is as a website manager to make posts fairly regularly throughout the course of a week, rather than all at once, since one post per day is likely to keep viewers more intrigued than a bombardment of articles on one day. Some other small tasks that I got exposure to included the collection of work from sources not directed associated with the FITlife Project for posts, and a bit of photo editing for a picture used on the home page. As these tasks demonstrated, there are several duties that go along with web development that are not directly related to coding, which was something I found relieving, since my ability to code certainly still needs work.

            Nevertheless, I did still manage to apply many of the skills I learned in my web development course at Messiah College, which greatly assisted me in a number of the tasks that I completed. For instance, when I first implemented the “Responsive” theme, I was having a bit of trouble getting the banner picture to shrink as the home page browser shrunk. Fortunately, the little bit of background that I had in CSS was extremely helpful and enabled me to resolve the issue by adding some code to the backend myself.

            While my second learning objective definitely proved difficult at times, I believe that in a review of the work that I have accomplished, this objective has largely been achieved. Without a doubt my experiences with the FITlife Project have not only enabled me to become a more proficient web designer, but also a more self-confident web designer. Prior to inheriting the task of redesigning the website, I strongly doubted my abilities to fully accomplish what I set out to do, but after hearing several people give me positive feedback, I now believe that with the proper mindset, I could succeed in a profession where my skills as a web designer would be called upon. Certainly I still have room to improve and much technical knowledge to obtain, but as my internship experience has revealed, a little research and the ability to step back and search for help can go a long way in improving my abilities to succeed as web designer. To see more of my experiences and work accomplished with the FITlife Project, please feel free to explore the rest of my personal portfolio.