Senior Show

What is it?

The senior show is where all of the seniors in e-Comm get to show off their best work and possibly get jobs or internships. Everyone from friends and family to administration to professionals come to this event to look at everything the seniors have done. 

This event is mainly senior run. Meaning the seniors run it, plan it, put it together, and are the main attraction. I was chosen to be put on the committee that planned it and put it together. My job was to represent the Web strand and to put together the website for the event.

The beginning

To start we met every second seminar on Thursdays. I started by getting all the information I needed to create the site. This included the logo, color scheme (which changed a few times), animations, graphics, and all of what they wanted to be in the site. Because the main focus of the event was the seniors, we wanted to main focus of the site to be the seniors. So I gathered all the names of the seniors and what strand they are in. 

Gathering it all

We then decided that we wanted to have each of the seniors contact information on the site. So I created a google form that asked for everyones: name, email, social media links. This was one of the most frustrating parts. The reason being that there was a large portion of people that just didn't turn anything in. I gave them a due date and over half of the seniors missed that date by a week and a half. There were a few that I or a teacher had to go to personally to make them turn it in.

This part was also the longest part. I had to go in and type up all the code for each person (see right for an example of one persons code). This took me forever because I had to go from the form and copy all the info in and even afterwards I had to keep going back and fixing parts of it because I either didn't put it in there correctly or the info given to me didn't work or needed to be changed a little to work as a link.

I also had to put in all the images for each person. We decided that it would be really cool if all the pictures at first look were just the normal, smiling, professional looking ones. And then when your mouse rolls-over the image then the image changes to the silly image that the person took. 

At first I had some troubles figuring out code that would work in WordPress. With the help of my dad and Mr. Olson we were able to figure out a little bit of JavaScript that worked. Then it was just a matter of sizing all of the images to the correct size (shout out to Annika and Katie who did a wonderful job doing this part) and inserting them in correctly. There were some kind of funny mistakes during this part because there were sometimes where I inserted the wrong image for the wrong person, but oh well it was an easy enough fix to go back and fix it.

Towards the very end of this project, meaning the week before the event, we decided that we wanted to have a quote from each senior. So I set up another google form asking each senior What brightens your life. I then took that information and put it into the site as well.

The End

After it was all said and done I was happy with the result and never wanted to see that site again haha. The event went very well as well. The decorations turned out really great and all of our hard work paid off.

This was a very good experience in the end. I learned how to work with others on a committee to plan and put together an event that will make everyone happy. I also learned that it takes a lot of patience to be working with so many people with different opinions and personalities. In the end I am happy with how it turned out and it was a great learning experience.