Grab the champagne and start the fireworks, we've finally launched our Student Innovators website.
Watch this movie if you haven't yet, it's called Booksmart and I think it's on Hulu. Solid flick.
It's taken a long while (and I mean a long while), but it's finally complete. Not really but it's mostly complete.
When I say it's complete, I mean that all the pages and the content and the images are done. It's all there. I still have to optimize for mobile (which I will do right after writing this post), amongst other things... But it's done.
If you're like me, you're sometimes a perfectionist, and so if you're like me, that sometimes means that it's really hard to finish things because nothing will ever reach your standard of "it's finally good enough." And while this website is not perfect, I'm really proud of how it turned out. There's a lot that I don't like about it, but I'm happy that it's finally live.
I'm happy because it looks pretty good for the first website I've made of this scope. The 8 point grid and all works wonders. Also really proud of the general site structure, even though yes of course, it's not perfect. The copywriting could definitely be better, but that's something I'm working on. And the overall process could definitely be improved (I've had so many inefficiencies because I tried to cut corners and it ended up taking much more of my time). But the custom illustrations, the small interactions, the functionality of the site, I love it all! It feels good to create and to make something you're proud of, and that's definitely something I'd want to do more of.
But there is definitely more work to do. For starters, I haven't set up any SEO for this site. At all. I haven't built and submitted a sitemap to google, I didn't make sure all the h1 tags are correct, I still have to add proper alt text to images, make sure that the title tags and meta descriptions are all there for each page... Or done any of the research to see which keywords are the best. Or done the Open Graph settings. Or cleaning up all the unused classes.
But hey! I'm just chuggin' along, a choo choo train on the track, going slowly but steadily. That being said, if you, good reader ma'amsir, are a fellow UTD student that's interested in learning or doing any of what I described above, then just let me know. There is so much more that I'd like to improve on for the site, like creating a design system, cleaning up the inefficiencies, and just growing the website along with the org, and I'd love to collaborate with people to make awesome things. Because that's the whole point of this organization, you know.
I know I haven't said much about it yet, but stay tuned to read more about Student Innovators, our mission, and our goals. Now that this thing is complete, I'll finally have an avenue to write down everything that I want to write about and post it here. So be alert! I'll post something again soon, I promise.
Well adios, toodleoo, and smell ya later!
-Oren
