About me!

The projects in this portfolio highlight my academic and professional interests, but also align with the competencies of the MAWRM program.

These competencies include:

• Visual communication theories and practices
• Scholarship and empirical research design methods
• Rhetorical theory
• Professional communication processes, procedures and practices
• Technological and media production literacies
• Writing and editing skills

In addition to my studies, I currently work as a full-time technical copywriter for PeakActivity to grow their research and documentation. With over 5 years of professional writing experience and extensive research, I know how to create easy to read, comprehensive marketing and technical content to help better document and market products.

About This Site

I created this website for submission to my MA committee members as a part of my MA defense in February 2020. After searching through hundreds of templates sites like Wix, WordPress, and Squarespace, I decided that I wanted something more customizable with a more professional feel and a little more functionality than any of the templates provided. I took on the challenge of learning to create an HTML site from a html5 template. I quickly found one for free on the site FreeHTML5.co, which was close to what I was looking for.

In my role as a Clemson CAAH web curator, I had been briefly trained on HTML, but my knowledge was limited to the specific tasks of editing existing text and replacing existing images. I started the project with a variety of YouTube tutorials on the basics of creating HTML sites from a template. They recommended me the use of Sublime Text Editor to edit the code, and after some time I figured out that I could save and open the file in Google Chrome to see the changes the code made. For a while, all I could do was change the text that existed in the template, but slowly with the help of w3schools HTML tutorial, I became more comfortable with the various tags and where they needed to go.

I authored the content in Google Docs, as I was most comfortable, following the guidelines given to me by my MA program. Once I had all the content written, I copied the content to build a page for each project. To better showcase my work in scholarship and my emphasis areas from my degree, I created “skills” pages.

While the content came together quickly, the customization of the site took longer to perfect. I built myself a brand logo, to match the template color scheme, and a favicon (placed on the page tab in a browser) using Adobe Spark, and wrote them into the site. But as I built more and more pages, I realized that the navigation from the template couldn’t support as many pages as I had created. So, using a variety of tutorials, and support from my brother, an industry software developer, I learned how to edit the .css style sheet to rewrite the navigation menu. One requirement was that it have a drop-down menu so that all of my projects could be accessed from the home page. I built the navigation and adjusted the style sheet to create a heading type that would be readable in the drop down. I was satisfied until I found that the new navigation wasn't mobile responsive. In fact, navigation on mobile was near impossible. I tried a number of tutorial options with little success, and finally I wrote the code myself. I duplicated the navigation with the second including just a dropdown icon and a projects dropdown. Then I rewrote the CSS to hide one while the other was present depending on the screen sizes. The site now has a custom built mobile responsive navigation bar.

Among other variations I made to the template, I added a section on the homepage to house my introduction video. I created the video in AfterEffects with support from the Clemson Video Production team. I embedded the video directly into the homepage from YouTube so that users could preview my work. I also added smooth-scroll navigation to each page so that the headings could be accessed through navigation in the sidebar of each page. Since my project descriptions were long, this will hopefully make the content easier to access.

To make my site easily accessible, I purchased the domain “caylin.me” so that all can easily find and view my site.

After nearly a year of other minor changes, I am very pleased with the results. I am now comfortable authoring in HTML, creating a site structure, and using HTML templates. I have even taken on another client project to build out a new website in the same way (more to come in future versions of this portfolio).