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The Caldwell Fellows is a service-learning and leadership fellowship that has been a huge part of my life during my time at NC State.

This project was the first “real” web project that I ever worked on, and probably the one I’ve spent the most time on. It’s a pretty simple informational website, but it’s pretty much been a sole endeavor from ideation to implementation.

I spent a lot of time in the beginning of this project meeting with a lot of different people to get ideas of what the fellowship program was really about. After that I created semantic structures for each “type” of thing the website should show (which became the pages), and then distilled that down further into how those things could be connected (see the modularity of the mission page).

After this, I went through a bunch of mockups using UXPin (which I really liked but was kind of expensive) and ended up with an essential design and the start of a style guide for the project.

I further developed that styleguide and then got to work implementing it within WordPress.

All in all, the experience of working with WordPress is not bad (especially for the non-technical folks who maintain much of the informational components of the site).

I am currently working on developing a more synchronized workflow (rather than just ssh-ing in and making changes to prod, gross I know!) so that someone can eventually take over and maintain the project.

I’m finding OpenShift and the WordPress cartridge to be a pretty intuitive place to create a sandbox that an unfarmiliar and novice developer can learn in. It helps that deploying involves using git, because it seems like good experience for the next person who will maintain the site to have.