I was very quick in volunteering to create the expedition website. I’m quite a creative person and I thought that I was well suited to the job and I was also keen to learn how to make a website as it is a skill that is bound to come in handy in the future. However, I did not anticipate the amount of hard work that had to go into it!

 

I met Cameron in the library café to get the ball rolling and he showed me a few basics that he had learned from previous expeditions. We decided to use a template from Wix.com and agreed on the basic design and layout of the site. The homepage design was to be based around an eye-catching video and a team photograph, however at that stage we had neither. Without the video or photo, and with exams fast approaching, the website went pretty much untouched until after Christmas.

 

After the Christmas break, and with grant/sponsorship applications being processed, we decided to push on ahead with the website even though we didn’t have a video or a team photo (and they were so fundamental to the design!). I had a pretty empty week and spent nearly all my spare time copying sections of our prospectus into their relevant pages on the website. This took a whole lot longer than I expected as almost everything needed reformatting and I had to make sure that the formatting was consistent across the website.

 

With most of the content up on the site, it was time to make it look like a proper website! Emma designed our wonderful logo and Hugh Anderson allowed us to use images from his previous expedition to Ol Doinyo Lengai. Unfortunately, by playing around with the design of the website, I managed to mess up the formatting of every single page and I spent a good few hours fixing it again. However, after clearing that hurdle, the site was finally ready to be published!

 

The rest of the team gave me some great feedback and pointed out a few typos and broken links. We also decided that it would be a good idea to add the ‘News & Events’ strip on the homepage to advertise upcoming projects. The website is by no means complete: we still need a video, some content on our science outreach page and we need to purchase a better domain. However, I’m really happy with what we have right now and I very much enjoyed making it!

 

By Andrew Steiner